There’s this great quote I came across last month from Maria Robinson. She states, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
It’s such a profound, yet simple, quote that I actually printed it up and have a copy of it hanging on my wall at work. I did this for a number of reasons. At the most basic level, it’s a reminder that nothing goes exactly the way we wish or hope it does. Sometimes, things muck up, or even start in a bad way. That doesn’t mean it will always have to BE that way, so why not leave the past in the past and move on? Aim towards the new or better ending.
The image attached to the quote is one of a tree at sunset. It reminded me of Rafiki trying to give little Simba a lesson about growing up (for those of you who’ve seen The Lion King). Things in the past can still hurt, but we shouldn’t dwell on them. Instead, we should just face forward. Let bygones be bygones, or leave the past in the past, or today is the first day of the rest of your life. Whichever way you want to take it, the lesson is that negative actions of the past can only drag you back, keep you down. Either forgive and move on, or forget and move on, if you can’t forgive and forget.
This kind of thinking comes up in my day-job as well. With Development, bugs happen, or scope changes, or whatever. Some frustration is bound to come up, but the best approach is to simply say, “Ok, what have we learned from this, how do we resolve it, and ensure it doesn’t happen again?”. It’s not the way you wish the work had started, but it’s now up to you to look at it with eyes towards getting a better ending.
See? That’s the beauty in the simplicity of “LifeTruths”. They can apply across the board, so long as you’re willing to step outside yourself sometimes and see things in a new light. I apply it to everything from work, to home, to trying to keep a regular blog going… 🙂