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When we look back at the past, knowing
what we know now, we often find it difficult to understand how we made
the mistakes we made. This is because once we learn new information, it
is nearly impossible to reenter the headspace we were in before we learned
that information. For example, if we look back at parents who spanked
their kids, we wonder how they could have thought that was a good idea.
Similarly, our personal pasts are full of mistakes we can’t believe we
made. We did things then that we would never do now, and this is
precisely because we have information now that we didn’t have or weren’t
able to access at that time.
From ideas about how to raise children
to how to treat the environment, our collective human past sometimes
reads like a document on what not to do. In many ways, this is exactly as
it should be. We learn from living and having experiences. It is from these
past actions that we garnered the information that guides us to live
differently now. In our personal lives, we probably had to have a few
unsuccessful relationships or jobs, learning about our negative
tendencies through them, in order to gain the wisdom we have now.
To live more peacefully with the past,
it helps to remember that once we know better, we tend to do better.
Prior to knowing, we generally do our best, and while it’s true that from
the perspective of the present, our best doesn’t always seem good enough.
We can, at least, give our past selves the benefit of the doubt. We did
our best with what knowledge we had. Beyond this, we serve the greater
good most effectively by not dwelling on the past. Instead we should
focus our energy and knowledge into our present actions. It is here, in
this moment, that we create our reality and ourselves anew with our
current knowledge and information.
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