Can't Go Back

After days of trying to catch up from a backlog born of twelve hour days and political bewilderment, I found myself thinking about the years and experiences that gave birth to this blog. For, while I have glanced back and shared memories of what my life once was, I have prided myself on looking not back, but forward, on not bemoaning the losses of the past, but rather, using those losses to propel me into the future.

And so, after days of trying to catch up, I realized that in looking backward, I was missing what was happening right in front of me. In trying to catch up, I was just putting myself farther behind.

In life, we don't like to leave gaps. We want the blanks to be filled, the road we travel to be paved. But when we focus too much on filling the gaps, we run the risk of creating bigger ones.

It is easy to wish we could go back and fix all the things we didn't do or should have done differently. But we can't go back. We can really only move forward. And when we make peace with the gaps of the past, moving forward becomes far easier. And when we look forward, the mistakes of our past can remain just that--mistakes of our past. We can't go back. So we may as well go forward.