We’ve all heard about life not being perfect and about needing to fail multiple times in order to succeed and that everyone makes mistakes. And all of this is true. And it applies in the macro as well as the micro. Our past lives are a record of our successes and our failures. And guaranteed, in order to be as successful in life as we are now (I know, it doesn’t feel like it, but trust me, you are) we have failed…spectacularly…a lot.
Want to succeed in business and be a sea captain with a merchant fleet, you end of shipwrecked with a crew that is out of meat and is looking at you as lunch. Want to have a large family and you choose to be a missionary and unfortunately your children all die of various diseases and injuries. Want to help the poor and end up dying in a political uprising. Want to have power so you come into the world as a guy and a Viking and end up lonely and alone on a decimated stretch of land with nothing to come home to.
We don’t always succeed. And it can be shocking to see the outcomes of lives where we didn’t. Sometimes those outcomes are out of our control like dying of a disease you caught because you were living with missionary parents. Sometimes they very much are like being a crappy ship’s captain and therefore becoming what’s on the menu when someone has to be the entre. We don’t think of ourselves as being those people because we aren’t them any more. We’ve learned from those events, we’ve grown and become and are now working on new lessons. And in this industrialized world where a great many of us do not live in situations where our lives are endanger regularly or in jobs which are dangerous to our health, it is an even bigger shock to our system to come face to face with our history which shows at one time we were and we did.
Past lives can be educational in many different ways. Hopefully one of the best things they can teach us is to be grateful for who we are now. We’ve worked very hard to get here and we are amazing. Cut yourself some slack today. You’ve earned it. 🙂