Starting from Scratch

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Have you ever looked at the life you’ve lived and wished you could go back and live it all over again?  Well I’m sure we’ve all had moments like that where we’ve taken a mental note of our current state of affairs and traced them back to a series of bad choices, blunders and mistakes; even playing out in our minds—sometimes over and over again—what we could have or should’ve done.  Well that’s hindsight.  Though hindsight is 20/20 it doesn’t do us much good, if any, because it’s after the fact.  It’s easy to conclude we should’ve taken a left turn when the right turn we took landed us in the middle of nowhere or in a set of not so favorable circumstances. 

 

Living our lives in hindsight causes us to live a life of regret.  However, a life of regret is no life at all.  Driving a car is a whole lot easier when our focus is on what’s straight ahead and not on the view in our rear view mirror.  If we keep our focus on our rear view, we’re bound to have or cause an accident.  How about looking ahead and instead of mulling over the mistakes of the past we use the insights we have gain from the past as a road map or compass to live the life we would have had we known better.

 

Have you ever heard the cliché “starting from scratch?” Well in the 18th century “scratch” was a crease scratched or etched into the ground and served as a boundary line in the game of Cricket.  It later came to be used as the name of any starting point for a race.  Sometimes in life we just have to start from scratch.  Why not make today your starting point.  Remember, it’s never too late to start over.

 

We may not be able to change the past or the way others view us because of our past, but we can take what we have learned from the past and make the present a much brighter one; so that down road—when we look back over our lives—we will have had no regrets going all the way back to “Scratch”.

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                               ~ Cathy Upshire

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