Your Past Is Irrelevant !
Inspired from the book - “The Courage To Be Disliked”
Our present does not depend on our past. Events of the past are not as influential on our present, as we think it to be.
If what we are is because of what has happened to us in the past, then people with similar past should be having a similar present life. Then your entire life should become scripted. Predictability increases and it reaches a point where you could determine your future with your past. A bit of probability, statistics, excel sheets and CHATGPT must be enough to predict how your life will be in the future.
But this is not how it works.
It is not the past experiences that influence your future. But how you perceive those incidents that determine your life.
It is not what happens to you that matters, but how you respond to what happens you.
Every action we take is always aligned to some inner goal we want to achieve. If you say “I am not comfortable socializing with people because I was shy as a child”, and you are not taking any action to change yourself, then clearly you have a goal to remain like you are, and are not willing to embrace the change. Maybe you enjoy being known as an introvert, or you have no real reason to become extroverted. If you actually wanted to be more social, you would be taking small actions towards becoming that sort of a person rather than finding reasons to justify your current state.
This is not to demean the pain and suffering people go through on being unable to change. The pain is real, and no one is faking it. No one is pretending to have a tough life. But the pain is a means to achieve some other inner goal. I am fully with you if you find this absurd and counter intuitional.
If your past determines everything, if what happens to you is the reason for your current state being, then your life can never ever be under your control. You are a slave to your circumstances.
Well if that is how you chose to look at life, then that is how your life will be. You will always be seen and heard complaining about how unfair life is. If you are doing that, maybe that is what you actually want to do. Maybe that is your goal.
Finding reasons to justify your problem are not the solutions to your problem. They might help you find a solution. But if you use the existence of these reasons as an excuse to not do anything about the problem, then that is only because you are achieving some other goal by not addressing the problem.
Let us say you go to the doctor with a cold, and all he does is say that the reason for your sickness is that you went out in the rain yesterday, you were not well dressed enough and have caught a cold. Well he might be right, but would you be satisfied with that?
No matter what the reason for your cold is, you would want to know what to do next to cure it. You are most likely looking for medicines to take and some instructions to follow.
The medicines might be hard to swallow, instructions hard to follow, but if you need the solution to your problem then you have to do it.
We comfort ourselves by giving reasons to our current state, and accept our fate as it is, rather than doing the hard thing, that is to solve it.
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