The past is a powerful place. It is where we spend up to 90% of our time. We have between 40, 000 and 60,000 thoughts per day and around 90% of them are spent thinking about the past. We can fret over tiny little slights, real or imagined; we can go over and over a conversation that we had, trying to pick out the ‘real’ meaning behind the words that the other person used; we can wish that outcomes had been different. We can do all of these things, but the one thing that we absolutely cannot do is change the past.
There are people perhaps known to us personally and several public figures who have overcome some horrendous situations and gone on to become remarkable individuals who have changed the course of the world. Nelson Mandela springs to mind. He had two choices, to hate the regime that had imprisoned him for 27 years of his life and so become bitter and twisted himself, or to forgive them, because in doing so he gave himself inner peace. He chose the latter and went on to become one of the most admired men in the world.
There are also people who have had bad things happen to them (or sometimes, things that other people don’t really consider to be that bad). These people have allowed themselves to be defined by that thing and have become unhappy and depressed. These people have lost their way and allowed their past to create their present, which in turn creates their future.
Which are you? Obviously, we are not all going to become a Nelson Mandela-like icons, but we can all choose to live the lives we want to live. It is a simple thing to stop your past from impacting upon your present and your future. Simple, but not easy.
Leaders, religious, political, educational and spiritual alike have said for centuries that they way you think affects the person that you are. Three examples, from three totally different sources:
Buddha said “The mind is everything. What you think, you become”
Einstein said “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”
Stephen Covey said “Live out of your imagination, not your history”
The theory is simple. The execution much more difficult. You simply have to think the life you want to have. You need to imagine it – totally and completely. Not a longing, with no actual effort being made to move towards it.
Top athletes use visualisation to improve their performance. Interestingly, experiments have been done that show that when a runner imagines running a race, really focuses and imagines everything; the starting blocks, the gun, the other runners, the smell of the racetrack, the sound of their breathing – everything – a strange thing happens. The muscles in their bodies respond as if they were really running the race! The mind and body don’t know the difference between real and imagined, if that imagined is detailed enough.
What could this mean for you? What can you imagine now that you are aware that imagining it in enough detail can make it happen?