Your Past: More is Less.
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“The past is our definition. We may strive, with
good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is
bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding
something better to it.”
- WENDELL BERRY
Leslie Poles, the famous writer once said that “the past is like a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Your past can do only one of two things for you. It can either empower you and serve as a place to learn and take joy from or it can limit you and keep you locked up in your rigid older self.
The common definition for insanity is expecting a different result by doing the same thing. If you keep doing what you’ve always done you will keep get what you’ve always gotten. This is why change is so important. There is a big difference between doing more and delivering more. When you deliver more you are creating more of what you really want. When you do more you just work harder and often with the same results as yesterday. This is why most people are just caught up in a cycle of behaviours where they keep doing the same things over and over again trying to produce a different result. In doing this they are actually re-creating and re-living “yesterday” every day. You have to start doing things differently if you want to produce a result and experience your life differently from what you had yesterday.
The challenge is that most people have ineffective strategies for life. The only strategies they know are the one’s they’ve tried before; from their past. They just keep using the same strategies over and over again and experience the same results over and over again. Out of frustration they then think they need to work harder to create what they really want. This then only creates the same results faster which starts a downward spiral that leads to “more of less.” When you keep doing things the way you’ve always done them you will only produce more of it and if you work harder at it you will only produce the same thing quicker which leads to you trying to do more and so on and on and on.
You needn’t reinvent the wheel to do things differently. Most often it is the smallest change that causes the biggest shift. Keep doing something differently until you get the results that you want. Reliving your “old” life is not a life worth living. Experiencing the fullness of life will only come from stepping outside your “knowledge base” which is grounded in what you “know” which is nothing other than your past. Whether you are remembering (your past) or experiencing (your present) or imagining (your future) you can always control and direct it with you amazing mind to create whatever you want for all of life is lived in thought anyway.
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