Challenge for the day:
Stop yourself from wondering how things may have turned out.
If you find yourself thinking 'what-if,' then stop.
You made each decision in your life for a reason;
there is no need to look back.
A week or so before my birthday, I was sitting in a coffee shop, my thoughts dancing with some trepidation to the tune of change. A new year, and a new decade, lay before me. The question in that moment wasn't yet, What will I do with the next decade? No, in that moment, I wondered more how to wrap my brain around starting a new decade, and how to properly remember the one I was wrapping up. So I grabbed a napkin and a pen and began to write, as I often do when I have no paper with me.
On one side of the napkin, I drew an outline covering all the years of my twenties. But instead of writing specific dates and events that occurred, I simply wrote key words that would describe, for sure not the whole of my twenties, but at this place and time, my emotions about my twenties. You might guess that they weren't super positive. I think "pain, hearbreak, disappointment, grief, shame and loss" are what I chose to write. I didn't write those to have a little pity party for myself on my napkin, for certainly there were just as many beautiful and wonderful memories and emotions I could have easily written there. I just needed to write those specifically sad ones down in order to highlight the freedom on the other side of the napkin.
I flipped the napkin over and drew another timeline, covering the years ahead of my thirties. All I wrote there was "Blank pages yet to be written upon...."
No need to look back.
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