How many times do we drive ourselves crazy ruminating or dwelling on how things “should have been”? How often do we bring up past experiences and think about them over and over? If we’re not careful, we might find ourselves replaying scenes from the past for months or even years.
I can remember one instance years ago when I was given a ticket from a police officer who said I was speeding. When I motioned to the other car that pulled over too, he insisted it was me and I was booked. I paid the fine, but was then angry with myself for not fighting it. Every so often I’d be driving along that stretch of road, and back would come that feeling of anger and the old “Why didn’t you fight that?” More than once I had to tell myself out loud to just let it go and remind myself there were times when I probably should have been booked and hadn’t been.
Often we keep bringing those things back to mind when we feel we’ve had no closure or resolution to the situation, or where we feel we’ve been dealt with unfairly. Dwelling on it or rehashing it over and over does not resolve or change things at all. All it does it upset us. We can’t go back and change things. What we can do though is to consider what we might do in a similar situation in the future.
For our own good, we need to put things behind us, accept that it is what it is, focus on the future and look at what our options are now.
