an anchor or a stepping stone? …

I LOVE QUOTES and I’m sure a lot of what I write now and in the future will be based on some quote I heard or read or stumbled on. I always enjoyed watching the HBO series “Sex and the City.” Sure, I sometimes cringed during parts of it, but there were always bits of wisdom thrown in – usually by Carrie Bradshaw when she was trying to think a situation through… for instance:

“Can you get to your future if your past is present?”
“Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you are to become who you will be.”

I always jot down things that are said that intrigue me – so I can mull them over… and these two were no different. My take on this whole thing is I don’t think the past is “an anchor holding us back” UNLESS we are hanging on to it. If we take past experiences, learn from them and move on, then the past is more of a stepping stone than an anchor. But if we are holding on to the past, hoping to shape it into what we HOPE it could be, what we WISH it could be, what we PRAY it could be — but we know it our gut that it never will, then I guess it is definitely holds us back.

The past definitely shapes our future, but it doesn’t have to be a predictor of the future IF we take our experiences and learn from them. One thing I’ve learned in my many years is this universal law: Lessons will continuously be presented to us until we finally figure ’em out. It’s then, and only then, that we can turn those sometimes horrible mistakes into lessons not to be repeated… and then we move on to our next lesson, because life is full of lessons.So, back to the quotes by Carrie –  I think the past only holds us back when we don’t learn from it… and building from that, we won’t be able to move forward or “get to our future” if past unlearned lessons are still present. Turning our past into a stepping stone instead of an anchor isn’t easy – and maybe we do have to let go of who we were to become who we will be.

More than once I’ve heard someone say there are no “mistakes,” only lessons, but I have to disagree. I think there are “mistakes” – it’s what we do AFTER the mistake that determines whether it becomes a lesson or stays nothing but a mistake. It’s what we do after the “failure” that determines the future…