189. Stuck In The Past

You can’t stop replaying past events. You keep wondering if there might have been a better way, if you could have done something differently. Perhaps if you’d made a different choice, you might be in a much better place, somewhere more whole, peaceful, and happy than where you are now.

You wonder about this because your life feels lacking, and this lack worries you. You feel you’re missing something, and this missing element has made your life inferior to the one you’d imagined for yourself. You know you once had this missing thing and you don’t understand how you lost it. You went from a world of bliss and endless possibility to whatever this is. All you know is that this is worse, and you cannot shake that feeling.

So you keep thinking and imagining, visualizing alternative lives that don’t exist, ones where you’d have the thing that’s now missing. You realize this exercise is pointless. It’s pointless because you can’t change the past. You’re stuck where you find yourself. Any alternative is now lost. You realize this and still you can’t stop thinking about it.

You wonder if all this thinking might serve some other purpose. You wonder if it might help you live this life you’re now living. You wonder if it might show you how to get that missing thing back again. You don’t know if this is true, but you want to believe it, just so that you’re not wasting your time by always looking backwards.

Perhaps it goes without saying that you’ve tried to stop. You really have, but no degree of mental fortitude seems to be enough to prevent thoughts of the past from arising over and over again. You feel there’s nothing you can do but wait for the day when it ends on its own. Then you’ll finally leave the past and return to the world of the present. That day cannot arrive soon enough.