The one habit that has improved my life the most is training myself not to look back. What is done is done, and cannot be redone, so it’s best to look to today — what exists today — no matter how I got here, and then go on from here.
This philosophy was described to me using a golf metaphor. If your golf ball lands in the sand, you need to concentrate on the shot as it exists, not how you got there. At the time of making the shot, how you got there is immaterial. Only the conditions existing now are what counts.
Sometimes, of course, I do look back, or else I used to, but only to figure out what — if anything — I did wrong so that I wouldn’t make that mistake again. (In the case of the golf metaphor, the golfer can critique the fatal shot after the game is ended if the golfer so wishes.) Otherwise, the sand trap I am standing in (or the green I am delighting in) are the only things that need concern me.
A problem I’ve always had is what I call roundaboutation. It’s when my thoughts continually replay the past, a mental loop, always trying to come up with a different outcome. Unfortunately, that outcome is always the same because that outcome is . . . today. Getting rid of that mental loop and accepting that today is what counts in going forward (as the old cliché goes, today is the first day of the rest of your life) makes for a much more serene life.
Also, any problems can be looked at as simply themselves, not as what created them, not as what I wish had happened, but simply the problem itself without any backstory or history. It makes focusing on a possible solution less complicated because there’s not a lot of murky shoulda/woulda/couldas clouding the issue.
I wish I could teach people this lesson, especially those who so often refer to ancient wrongs committed by forebears, who think that because this country — like all countries — had a bloody and immoral past, it negates whatever good exists in the present. Concentrating on the past makes it easy to teach people to hate this country. If people could ignore the past, take today as it exists right now, where most of those situations no longer exist, figure out the direst problems today, and go from there, people would be much more accepting of the good. But no . . . grievance is about the past even more than the present or future, and a grievance culture needs the past.
Thinking of that is part of the sand trap for me. I need to concentrate on my own sand trap, not anyone else’s, even though their position on the sand trap might affect me.
Still, for serenity’s sake, today is the starting point — what is actually present in my life and what I can do, not what other people do that might (or might not affect me).
This serenity was hard won. I wasn’t able to slough off grief as so many people do. For me, for many years, my present was my grief (or do I mean my grief was my present?) Either way, I had to deal with all the burdens that came from losing that one special person (as well as my parents and brothers) until I could let go of the past. In fact, it’s those years of grief, way more than any golf metaphor that helped me. No matter how many times I replayed those last days, weeks, years, of our shared life, it always came out the same — him gone from this world. Me alone.
And that’s what I deal with. My life today. And it’s a good life.
As long as I leave the past in the past, anyway, and don’t create — or recreate problems that don’t exist today.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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