Forget your past.
If I have sage advice to offer from the perspective of fifty-four years, it’s this: forget your past. Memories are helpful only insofar as they can teach you how to approach tomorrow and nothing else. It’s true of pleasant memories as well as bad. Remember something good? Try to have a good feeling now; don’t spend time looking back. Remember something bad? Avoid that wrong decision moving forward. And that’s it.
I’m on record here as saying that regret is an unhealthy emotion. It results from spending too much time trying to relitigate the past. But there’s a flip side to this: people trying to recapture their youth.
Yes, this is a sobering thing to consider, but you aren’t as young as you used to be, and you will continue to put distance between the events of your past, good or bad until the day you stop breathing. What you’ve done with your life up to this point is immaterial because the past is past. The fun you had. The love you knew. The accomplishments you earned. The mistakes you made.
Who are you today? What are you doing tomorrow? These are the only questions that matter. These can be addressed using experience as a guide, but holding onto memories for any other purpose is wasteful. You exist in the now. That’s one thing you shouldn’t forget.
It’s easy to hold on, but you’re growing old even as you read this, and your memories are holding you back.