If We Could Start Our Life Over

If you could go back in time and start your life over again, where would you want to start?

Let me brainstorm this with you.

When a friend asked me this question the first thought that came to my mind was… it all depends on how old we are when we get there!

And that got me thinking even further. The following is my philosophical analysis of the trip back in time and how I realized that remembering life experiences with a positive attitude can help overcome obstacles we have in front of us today.

If we are to start over, there may as well be a good reason for doing it. Learning from our past can help our present lives if we know how to use the knowledge we acquire from starting over. We may meet our inner child and get to know him or her.

How old we are when we start over has a lot to do with our ability to make use of the journey. If we go back and become the age we were at that time, then starting over from birth would be silly. It wouldn't help at all. We would be an infant all over again and probably end up making all the same mistakes as we did growing up the first time. So let's try to determine the best age to start over.

So what if we went back to a time when we were at an age where we already had some knowledge of the world? Back to an age where we already had an understanding of right and wrong.

Would we be able to get our life started again with better results?

If we go back to an age when we knew enough to have some inclination to guide our path, we may have hit upon the right time of our life to start over and do it better.

We might be able to follow a different path if we could start over from an earlier time with the knowledge we acquired throughout life the first time around.

But maybe we might still find ourselves making similar mistakes while following a different path. Why? Because the main part of the process, our ego, has not changed.

Who Were We Then? Who Are We Now?

If we go back with the knowledge and experience we accumulated every moment since our past, I have a feeling that nothing will be different. We’d have to change our ego.

We’d have to change who we are entirely. Our personality is acquired from all our experiences, all the people we know, all the trials and tribulations that we had gone through, all the mistakes we’ve made, even all the lucky streaks we’ve had.

All that had shaped us into who we are. If we took all that with us, all that which makes up our personality, and go back to an earlier time in our lives, then we’d be no better off. We would just repeat the same patterns all over again.

The only way to make it work differently is to understand who we were then and now. And that involves understanding what makes us tick. We need to understand why we do the things we do.

We have both positive and negative references to our past. We would have to erase those references that are detrimental to us in the present.

But erasing the past is not possible. Rather, we need to come to terms with how we relate to the experiences we’ve had in the past.

If we go back to an earlier time in our lives with the knowledge and wisdom we have today, this may allow us to be more positive in how we relate to experiences that disturbed us at the time. Those experiences are causing conflicts in our present. The conflicts are the result of unresolved issues with those experiences.

If we could actually erase the effects of those experiences, would that mean we could jump-start our life?

Well, we can’t erase the past. That’s a part of us now. Going back will only allow us to revisit those events and rework them in our minds.

Let’s elaborate on that and see where my brainstorming takes us.

The past is gone. Things happened in the past and those things affect us today. Can we drop all negative feelings and dismiss it? Not so easy, I know. Actually I can say from my own experience that it’s impossible.

And there is no reason to try to fool ourselves and dismiss our feelings and emotions. I think it’s great that we have these feelings. It means we’re alive. And we have been molded into the person we are based on how we let those past experiences affect us.

Do your feelings bother you? Do those feelings relate to bad things from the past that come back to haunt you over and over throughout your life? Do you wish you could function on a different level? I can’t stop it. And you can’t either. It’s part of who we are.

The best we can do is work with it. Understand it. And own it. I think some therapist must have told me that. I didn’t just come up with that notion. But as I brainstorm this whole thing with my long answer to the initial question, all this comes to mind.

Let me continue. It’s all beginning to make sense.

Those experiences from the past molded us and created the ego within us that makes up our personality. We may want to change it. Reviewing our past, we become aware of how certain things about our ego have been getting in the way. Why can’t we just erase it, dismiss it, do away with it, become a new person. Become a different person.

Who are we kidding? We don’t want to do that. Maybe some people do! I guess that might be what multiple personality disorder is all about.

But we are healthy. We know that because we see how we’ve been able to survive through life so far, figuring out how to deal with all of life's issues that present themselves. We’re good at that and we need to give ourselves credit for that.

Maybe we really don’t need to go back and start over after all. We have the power right here.

Focusing Our Energy

All we need to do is recognize who we are and the power we have to succeed. Think about all the ways we have done things right.

When you think about it, there are an infinite number of ways to do things wrong, and just one right way. Well maybe more than just one, but definitely not an infinite number of right ways. Life would be way too easy if that were the case.

If there are so many ways to do things, we need to consider which one may work best for us. We need to do this for each decision in life, coming to terms with past experiences that may force us to chose a different option.

Focusing on the best option to chose from will help save our energy. We, as human beings, are really like machines. We burn energy. We only have so much of it.

Since we've made it this far in life, then we must really have some major power force within us, recognizing that we can see where we are failing.

But we may be dispersing our energy in all the wrong places, contemplating negative past issues and allowing them to interfere with our present lives. We just need to put all our energy into the present, this moment in time. Using our present knowledge. And not waste our energy.

You may have hear the syaing by an unknown author, "The past is gone, tomorrow isn't here yet, but today is a gift. That's why they call it the present."

If we waste our energy thinking of the past, worrying about how the past may affect us, then we won’t have any energy left to move forward with positive results.

The past has no effect on life anymore except in a way that we let it affect us. The way we process our feelings is based on our past. We can change how the past affects us by changing the way we think about it.

Our past makes us function as we do because we learned certain behavior from our past experiences. But the past, in and of itself, no longer exists and we are wasting precious energy and time thinking about it and ruining our lives based on things we experienced way back in time.

Don’t dismiss the past, accept it and learn from it. Do something about it.

Notice when you are wasting energy worrying.

Pay attention when you hesitate to do something because you feel you will fail.

Discover when you procrastinate and come to terms with the reason for it before it destroys you.

Realize when you blame the world, other things or other people, for limitations that you can do something about with your own energy.

Catch yourself when you are not being kind to your inner child.

Think about it when you want to start over.If we feel we need to start over, there’s no need to go back to do it. We can start over from anywhere. Right from here is a good place to start!

I wrote an alternate discussion in "Would You Live Your Life Over If Exactly The Same?" as a different concept. It's a whole different philosophy when we consider the option of doing it over all exactly the same. If you enjoyed this discussion, I hope you check out my alternate viewpoint.

Copyright © 2011 Glenn Stok

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