Your past does not equal your future

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

It doesn’t help to live in the past. I’ve learned it’s not going to change the outcome for us, unfortunately. If it did, I would do that all day every day. But because it doesn’t, it doesn’t help to do that. And all I can do is hope for a better tomorrow and hope for a better next time.

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

I hope we will not live in the past. People who live in the past don't have very much future. There is a great tendency for us to lament about our losses, about decisions that we have made that we think in retrospect were probably wrong decisions. There is a great tendency for us to feel badly about the circumstances with which we are surrounded, thinking they might have been better had we made different decisions. We can profit by the experience of the past. But let us not spend our time worrying about decisions that have been made, mistakes that have been made. Let us live in the present and in the future.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Learn that living in the present moment will always heal you. Living in the past forces you to align with it, especially if there is pain. Living in the future forces you to be anxious — live here.

If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday — oh

If you live in a past dream, you don’t enjoy what is happening right now because you will always wish it to be different than it is.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.