Believe it or not, most of us are habitual in defending our past as a sacred event in life. Usually, destiny is given all the credits for everything that has happened. The concept of destiny is good but only until it gets applied to our past. However, an emphasized reliance on this philosophy can be potentially disastrous. The moment one relies on the secret outcomes of the so-called ‘destiny,’ chances are that complacency and ‘action inertia’ may paralyze life. The idea of destiny definitely assuages pain and allows an individual to let acceptance seep into self-consciousness.

When you are in the mode of justifying your past, the chances are that you might not be learning from it. Think about it. It may just be possible that you are knowingly ignoring your mistakes of the past. I have come across many people who vehemently argue to justify their destiny. Such people are rarely keen to retrospect in the right spirit. They are never ready to acknowledge some wrong moves they might have taken. Fate is good to apply only for a past calibration that may NOT have much to be carried forward. 

We have umpteen times come across the quote, “Past is gone.” However, there is a sea of action between quoting a utopian fact and embodying it in our lives. You must have read about students who could not pass a particular examination and resorted to suicide. There are many cases of grown-ups who cannot come out of their past failures. Overindulgence in your past can blind you from a tremendous prospective future. The effort must always be made to become future-ready. 

One update which we all can bring to our life today (and every day) is to start living in our present. Well, this is easier said than done. For most of us, the past is a cage that does not allow the sunshine of tomorrow to peep in. One needs to break this cell. The best way to come out is to refuse your mind to accept the bars. One must stop relishing the delicacies of the past. 

If you wish to create something new or want to revitalize your life with a lot of hope and energy, start diffusing the impact of your bad experiences. Some family members cannot breathe freely in their present in many households. Every incident today is an offshoot of something unfruitful from the past. They walk into their next moments with a high degree of negative vibrations. The tragedy happens when such people get into morbid extrapolations.

Imagine someone screams abuses to you over the phone. What happens next? You become anxious, angry, nervous, and uncomfortable. It will become challenging for you to focus on your work at hand in the next few hours. Now visualize that twelve months have passed by since this incident happened. Would you still feel the same heat of that filthy phone call? If yes, you have not learned to live in your present. The ideal situation is to become more potent than your emotional upheaval and have the ability to absorb your anxieties.  

One more villain in this village of the past is the human ego. Sometimes it becomes hugely inflated and unreasonably disallows a person to agree and/or accept mistakes. I recently saw a web series where the boss who sounded absolutely ruthless on day one turned out to be a very caring and compassionate person. Had the employee locked his opinions based on the day one experiences, he would have lost a great superior to work with! 

Friends, make peace with your past. That’s the only way to let the flower of joy bloom in the present. If you are feeling sad and disheartened, give yourself a chance. Introspect, and you may realize that you are under illusion, opaqued by falsehood & unrealistic fantasies born out of your unworthy experiences. 

All that we need to gain in our future is directly proportional to our attitude about our present. Time is a vector that moves dot by dot, moment by moment. It can only travel in one direction – which is towards the end. The future must always be attributed to the ‘power of creation. It must be a core human value that the future brings all possibilities until it converts into the past. We must all make efforts to embrace our ‘NOW.’

This blog was originally posted on Times of India by Author.