“Don’t look back, you aren’t going that way.” -Author Unknown
Several years ago, while driving down a seven lane road that runs through the city I live in, I heard a noise. I looked in my rear view mirror just in time to see a pickup flying sideways through the air, coming down in the middle of the road. While serving as an elected official, I worked with people who could not easily see the future of my community because they were so busy looking in the rear view, focused on what had happened rather than what could be.
“Don’t look back, you aren’t going that way.”
Why do we look back in our lives? Why is it so easy to spend our time looking behind us? Well, the past is just that, the past. We lived through it, it is a known quantity and the known can be more comforting than the unknown. Unfortunately, looking back can also make us focus on the mistakes and hard times we have lived through. Our pasts also include our spouses, loved ones who are no longer with us here in mortality. We miss them, we miss the good and hard times we had with them. So we look in our life’s rear view rather than out the windshield where our future is before us. The view out the back may have easier times than what we are going through now, so it is feels safer to be doing that.
Just like in driving, it is so important to stay focused on what is in front of us through the windshield. Yes, we may get some bugs on our life’s windshield, but it is still better than trying to move down life’s road always looking back. We need to acknowledge what is behind us as that has been part of where we are going now, but it is not the place to dwell. It is time to look at the vistas out our front windows.
I am trying to look at my life through the windshield. I treasure the past and like the time I saw the truck flying through the air, am glad I am not back there, experiencing those things again. I am clutching my life’s steering wheel, patiently driving while my GPS continues to say “Recalculating”.
“Don’t look back, you aren’t going that way.”
