Embrace Your Past

First of all, not one, nor two, but three companies I applied to (and made it to various stages with) have shown ads on my blog in the last week.  I find this...hilarious.  I'm not even sure how it's happening, but good for you Google, good for you.  I even clicked on one that didn't bring me in.

I am taking the week to organize my office, which at present means opening up the dozen or so boxes of my things that remained and figuring out what on Earth to do with them.  At first I found this process utterly terrifying; each box contains memories, and you have no idea what they are going to be until you actually open it.  Some of these haven't been opened since 2008, and some of those very boxes contain what I'd consider actually sacred possessions.  Some of the memories are amazing and wonderful, others were kind of crappy, and all of them left me feeling a sense of loss and emptiness.  At the moment my life is pretty, well, boring.  Some would argue that I'm at a very exciting crossroads, but that's just not really the way I felt while I was opening those boxes.  I felt alone (which I was and don't like) and very sentimental.  My lady pointed out that sentimental is good, just feel happy about it, but that wasn't the way it was working.  Eventually I figured out that it was an overwhelming feeling of "loss" that I was dealing with.  I don't save things like she does; I don't have very many trinkets or even pictures from my childhood.  I haven't seen my parents as much as I'd like in the last decade.  I don't currently have many strong local friendships.

Yada, yada, yada blah blah blah.  The point was I was getting kind of down thinking about my past and what in it had led to what I felt like was "missing" from my current life.  And you know what?  That's a bunch of bullshit.  My past is what it is.  Everything I have done, even the catastrophically stupid things (and I'm not talking about poker here), has led me to where I am right now.  There is no point in looking back and being sad, that's just crazy and silly.  It makes more sense to embrace your past.  If you made mistakes, think about them, learn from them, then push them aside and live in the moment.  Enjoy your life for what it is.  Don't settle, try to make things better, but at the same time enjoy what you have and be happy about the choices you have made that led you to have it.  I mean really, why not?