Whether it’s a new year, the end of a dating relationship, or just a nagging feeling that things need to change, now is a great time for a fresh start.

Let the Past Die

“Today is a brand new day, it hasn’t been touched yet.”-Raymond Joseph Dufrene (My Pawpaw)

We all make mistakes. We all get taken advantage of. Every one of us has scars and regrets of one kind or another. No one is immune. We are all, to varying degrees, bruised, broken, and damaged.

One sure way to be a miserable single person is to carry around all that baggage of your past. Your past relationships, past heartbreaks, and past failures have one thing in common. They are the past. You are in the present.

Why let your present get ruined or even overly influenced by your past? Let it go. Let it die. Don’t keep it alive by reliving it over and over in your mind,

Today is, as my Pawpaw every so often wisely reminded me, a brand-new day, fresh and untouched. The only way it gets tainted by the past is if we let it. We choose whether today will be its own day or be usurped by some day in the past.

Kill It If You Have To

The problem is those feelings and memories of the past are tenacious. They fight and scream for a place in our consciousness. So, sometimes to make a fresh start we have to consciously kill the past.

The past entices us with thoughts of how good it feels to let the anger and righteous indignation rise up and overtake us and tell us we deserve some time to stew in the juices of past wrongs. Or, the past demands that we mourn indefinitely for our past mistakes and wrongdoings. And, we tend to agree with it that we don’t deserve to get over it.

But, we do – we do deserve to get over it. And, we do that by purposely focusing on the present and then looking to the future.

We all make mistakes along the way. Just make sure you put some guardrails in place to not make similar mistakes again. We all do wrong. But, if we ask, there is forgiveness. Now go and do right the right things.

Related post: Guardrails to Help You Thrive as a Single

The thought of a past event will, from time to time, enter your mind. That doesn’t mean that you have to invite it to stay and serve it a Salted Caramel Mocha and scones. You can show it to the door politely or just toss it out, but either way, it has to go.

Take the Lessons With You

However, there is one part of the past you do need to take with you into the future – the lessons you have learned.

If you have dealt with the past in a healthy way you have learned valuable lessons. Those need to remain a part of your life. You can forget those lessons and repeat the same or similar mistakes over and over again. Or, you can use remember them and use them as a foundation on which you build your fresh start.

Don’t waste the suffering or pain your past inflicted on you. Learn from it. And, once you learn those lessons hang on to them like your future happiness depends on them.

A Fresh Start

I am writing this around the first of the year. That’s always a good time to make a fresh start. But, anytime a season of life or a relationship comes to an end is also a good time for a fre...