Reignite Your Thoughts

Daily Stoic for January the 20th: reignite your thoughts.

“Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones. . . . It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did—that is how to restart life!”
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.2

What happened yesterday, last year, or just five minutes ago belongs to the past. This simple and obvious truth is more powerful than we usually acknowledge.

I have made lots of bad choices in my life. From buying a house to spending years in jobs I hated.

Those are of course the “big ones”, but there is a myriad of small mistakes that I have made and keep on making. Sometimes, some of these bad choices still haunt me at night, or assault me in the middle of my day.

If I could go back in time, there will be a lot of things I would do differently. Obviously, most of us probably have that same wish.

However, everything we have done is there to stay. We cannot change that. What we can do is learn from that and start making different choices.

Forgive Yourself In Order To Reignite Your Thoughts

The only thing that matters is what’s ahead of us. Our future. While our present may be influenced by our past, our future only depends of our following decisions and actions.

We need to get rid of the past.

In order to do that, we sometimes need to forgive ourselves. All those things that I regret from my past, all those bad decisions that come to my mind now and again, keeping me awake at night, are there because I need to let them go. And I haven’t.

Thus, starting today, I want to commit myself to forgiving what happened yesterday to be able to enjoy what’s going to happen tomorrow.

Conclusion

Today’s Daily Stoic, “Reignite your thoughts”, discusses how sometimes we are haunted by our past. What we did or didn’t, something we shouldn’t have said, a different path we should have chosen. However, no matter what happened in the past, all that matters is the future. We can always change our ways and do something different with our life.

It’s time to stop worrying about what we did, thought or told and start focusing on what’s to come.