someday you'll laugh about this

I'm human. I make mistakes. All the time. And despite all the quaint little adages about learning from your mistakes and laughing about it later, I've often struggled to do so.

Until now.

You see, part of the joy of being a borderline obsessive journaler is that all of your past mistakes and feelings are forever immortalized in a bound book that is representative of your life. In the past, when I've reread my journals, I've felt ashamed or embarrassed by my stupid decisions and generally felt like an idiot. Earlier this week I reread the journal from a particularly mistake ridden period of my life and I laughed. I still felt like an idiot, but I laughed at my blindness, my naivete, my general inability to distinguish up from down, good from bad, and right from wrong.

And as I sat on my bed at 2:00 in the morning, giggling to myself and sharing some of my sillier actions and former feelings with Emily, something dawned upon me: my past actions are the best mold for my future actions. Not all of my decisions, emotions, and thoughts have been idiotic and asinine; every now and then I actually make a smart, mature choice when faced with potential bad decision making, and I can emulate those choices in the future. In contrast, I really can learn from the bad decisions of my past and use them to grow, to change, to become. I can take every "what was I thinking?!" and "how didn't I see that was a bad idea?" and use them as references for next time I'm faced with a similar situation.

Where I was naive before, I can be smarter; where I allowed my decisions be be based on pure emotion and not logic, I can be more grounded; and where I was blind, I can open my eyes and see.

I've found that there is no point in agonizing over past mistakes and silly choices. Throwing every penny, nickel, and quarter you own into a  well, wishing that you hadn't done this or said that won't make you richer of mind--it will just give your wallet a serious slim down.  As my good friend Rafiki once said, "The past can hurt, but the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it."

I choose to learn from the past. I choose to laugh about the illogical and silly choices that I've made. And I choose to take that knowledge and that laughter and harness it into something I can use to make my future brighter, smarter, and better.