How often have we cried over the spilled milk of our mistakes, asking ourselves Why?! and wishing to relive our life so that we would not repeat them… again, in retrospect?! How silly of us, however. Our past mistakes are just like birthmarks on our body: they are what we are, and there is no way for us to go back to the past, trying to undo what cannot be undone, that is, trying to be born again without them. But, instead of thus keeping torturing ourselves over these blights, we can venture to learn something about ourselves and do for our future what cannot be done for our past.
Learning from our mistakes is always a good thing. But “self-condemnation, continual self-reproach, self criticism, a constant looking into self” (quoting the great American doctor James Tyler Kent), in other words, dwelling on our past mistakes and complaining, "What if?", is quite another. It’s like trying to perform a cosmetic plastic surgery on our past. But, like with any cosmetic plastic surgery, there ought to be an understanding that it works only superficially and only as an expression of our vanity in most cases, whereas occasionally such a surgery on our image of ourselves can do us more harm than good, when wishing to repair what is essentially us we may end up renouncing our whole life and our own peculiar individuality.
Learning from our mistakes is always a good thing. But “self-condemnation, continual self-reproach, self criticism, a constant looking into self” (quoting the great American doctor James Tyler Kent), in other words, dwelling on our past mistakes and complaining, "What if?", is quite another. It’s like trying to perform a cosmetic plastic surgery on our past. But, like with any cosmetic plastic surgery, there ought to be an understanding that it works only superficially and only as an expression of our vanity in most cases, whereas occasionally such a surgery on our image of ourselves can do us more harm than good, when wishing to repair what is essentially us we may end up renouncing our whole life and our own peculiar individuality.
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