An Aunty recently sent a photo of me as a baby. My first thought was of my parents who had the same photo on our lounge wall which I was always uncomfortable with, more so as a teenager when my friends came to our home.
Looking at the photo a second time today, I now see only innocence and pondered - I wonder what you might be thinking when this photo was taken if you only knew what the future held for you? Innocence is what we are all born with. Innocence of what the future holds for us. Needing to be loved, wanting to be valued, hoping to be our best self, wishing that…. 'Life' then happens, and the innocence is gone.
I have never truly looked back on my life until very recently for fear of remembering the bad times, the failures, the disappointments, the regrets. There are many, but seldom do they come to mind these days. Why? Because we all must realise that life happens and much of it, I now realise that we had little or no control over. We certainly had little control over what life 'threw' at us, the bad things that happen to us. If we did have control, it tended to be reflecting only on why we made the choices we did either prior to or following the bad event.
The innocence of a child. No choice whatsoever from the very beginning as to how life will unfold. Being born was not our choice, the family we were born into another that was not ours to choose, nor was there choice in how we were raised, what school we went to, nor the food we consumed. Most choices were made for us, our future life almost preordained rather than from our own influence.
Genetics, the first 1000 days, our environment. Many factors influence what occurred to us as we grew and made us into who we have become. Choice only comes to us as we grow older and then those choices remain influenced from what happened in our early childhood. It’s not necessarily our fault how life unfolds for us when bad things happen. Not unless we made a rational decision unfettered from our past influences, and who can do that with any certainty.
Our work at WARN allows us to speak with many people, a majority of whom have ongoing regrets. Regrets are often self-destructive. They were designed as simple reminders of things past to enable us to avoid them in the future. 'Don’t go down by the river because you were nearly eaten by a crocodile last time you did so'. We then ruinate that we should have known better despite our forebears being able go down by the river safely! Regrets are merely designed to keep us safe, to avoid future risk. So often they don't!
A practical exercise you may find helpful if you think that you have made poor choices in your life which led to bad events occurring is to look back on your life and examine the choices that you made when bad things happened. What influenced you to make the choices that you made in each one? Was it freewill, what you had learned, misfortune, or perhaps it was something intuitive? Was it truly your fault that the choice you made was without any influence whatsoever?
I suspect seldom was it a choice that we made rationally at the time that led to a bad outcome. I'll wager that there was a lot of emotion involved when the decision was made, and the stronger the emotion the more regret we will be left with.
We continuously look to the future in these fast-paced times, intermittently we are in the present when required to focus, seldom do we look back and often only to regrets. Look back to good times, look back to make amends if you can, and always look back to regrets to see what influenced our choice at that time.
If we want to find answers as to why 'life' happened, we must always look back. We should examine the reason or reasons behind our decision which will help us to see that the choice we made may not have been ours alone. We were influenced by other factors, emotions being the biggest one.
It’s not necessarily our fault. Life happens. Often for no valid reason, it just happens. Mostly, it’s out of our total control. There are just so many influencing factors that we could not see clearly enough to fully consider. Not an excuse, simply a reason.
It’s not necessarily our fault.
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