Part Thirty-Five: Look Back, Pick Up, Move On

            Titles have a habit of popping into my head during showers or at any time no pen or pencil is available.  Sometimes I lose them, but sometimes if I keep repeating them like a mantra they stick in my head long enough to scribble them down or get to my computer.

            So this Monday morning here I am at my computer, title recorded, to think more about choices and regrets.

            It would be wonderful if all choices presented themselves clearly.  Once in a while they do, but much of the time they don’t.  Even the most detailed pro and con lists fail to clarify.  Have you ever made a poor choice that you thought was a good choice—or vice versa?  Or wondered what would have happened if you had made some different choices?

            The problem is that hindsight is so much better than foresight.  It’s easier to look back on one’s life and see cause and effect chains than it is to predict them.  Of course, that also makes it easy to get stuck in regrets or what ifs. 

            That’s where this morning’s title comes in.  Looking back is a good practice, I believe.  I can learn from my past choices, whether good, bad, or indifferent.  Or black or white or gray.  But if I get stuck in the what ifs and regrets and spend my present spinning my wheels over my past, well, that is really counter-productive.  Picking up is acknowledging the decisions I have made over a lifetime (or a day or an hour) and putting them to rest so I can move on. 

            Which is exactly what I plan to do at this very moment:  now that the initial words are recorded to review and revise later, I’m going to Walmart.