Sometimes we think about what we would like to change in our past.
We have regrets or second thoughts about what we did.
We think things might be better if we did something different.
Yet our perspective is so limited.
We don’t really see the implications of our actions far into the future.
What seemed like a bad choice twenty years ago, looks like a good decision ten years ago.
Today that choice may seem bad again, or even worse.
In ten years from today it may seem like a great decision.
In fifty years it might even look like the perfect choice.
Had we made a different choice and taken a different path, we would have ended up in a totally different place.
What that place would look like today could be anyone’s guess.
We might be the person we were madly in love with, or we could be in a horrible relationship.
We could be more wealthy that we could imagine, or we could be destitute.
We may be as healthy as ever, or we may have a fatal disease.
Even if we were much wealthier today because we chose a different path, we might be any happier.
Perhaps the person we were once so in love with ends up leaving us for someone else.
There are so many variables involved in life that it is impossible to tell where we would be today if we even made just one different decision years ago.
So why do we fret over it so much?
Why do we waste so much time thinking about how things could be different?
Perhaps it is simply because we have such a hard time seeing the perfection in our lives today.
As our perspective is so narrow, it makes it hard to envision the bigger picture.
After all, we only on this planet for a mere century, usually less.
In contrast to the age of the universe, or even the age of this planet, it is less than a single atom in an entire ocean.
Like a pointillist painting where there are so many little dots, we have to step back to see the picture clearly.
Only when we step back from our daily life, do things even begin to come into focus.
And in the grand scheme of things, how can we tell if we have made the right decisions or not?
Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask.
Maybe it is more about seeing how everything that we have done is actually perfect the way it happened.
Whether we can see it or not.
For how could we have done any different than we did?
We live our lives as best we can each moment.
Just because we would live differently today than we would have years ago, does not mean we could have any differently all those years ago.
If everything is here to serve us, perhaps all those apparently wrong decisions were actually the right ones?
Maybe we have lived our lives in the exact perfect way we did?
So what regrets can you let go of today?
How can you learn to see your life as the perfect tapestry it is?
~ Sam Liebowitz, The Conscious Consultant