Episode 08 – Facebook Gives Me Advice! – Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome to Twisted Thinking, the podcast that helps you keep your thoughts flexible. My name is Kristin, and today we are talking about how to live your best life. That’s right. I found the answer, and I found it on Facebook. Of course. Uh, according to this:
Life works best when we focus on where we’re going, instead of where we’ve been.
Uh, to be fair, this seems like good advice to me.
Like if you’re driving a car, you don’t wanna spend too much time staring in the rear-view mirror. You’re liable to, I don’t know, drive off a cliff or something. So this seems pretty logical. But then, right underneath that post, I found another one. And this one was from, uh, from the philosopher, George Santayana and he said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
And this made things a little awkward. Which is it Facebook? Do we ignore the past and barrel on into the future or do we ponder the past and let the present just fly by?
All kidding aside, it really is a good question. The first meme it’s pretty popular in our day-to-day lives.
I see it, uh, get tossed around a lot as a motivational saying. Like it’s meant to remind people to stop dwelling so much on the things that you can’t change, i.e. the past and focus on the things that you can, i.e. the future. And I suspect that we see this one more often, because it’s easier to do on a daily basis.
And by easy, uh, I don’t necessarily mean it’s easy to ignore the past, although for some people it is, but easy in the sense that when we don’t focus on the past too much, we don’t have to do a lot of introspection or analysis of our actions. We can avoid, uh, reliving and thinking about events that can be really quite deeply uncomfortable or even traumatizing.
The second quote is heard more often, I think when it comes to politics or more institutional kinds of things, Churchill famously paraphrased it in 1948 during his speech in front of the house of commons when he said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And maybe that’s why we kind of pigeonhole into that school of thought because we associate it with, with that.
And it, it gives it almost a grander scheme type of feeling.
But what I find interesting about the idea that Santayana gives us is that it seems to fit individuals better, like you or me. It, it seems to fit us better. Something about it strikes me as more applicable and realistic and even healthier than just putting one foot in front of the other and never looking back.
Like it seems that the first saying is urging you to do, I would think that learning from where we screwed up in the past, and remembering the lesson and then applying that lesson to our present and our future would be a good thing.
I remember, um, my first real relationship we got together when we were 16 and we were together until our early 20s.
It ended up being somewhere around nine years or something. She was an absolutely amazing girl and an even more amazing woman today. Shout out to her. I know she’s listening, but I was rotten. I was absolutely terrible. Everything that you shouldn’t do to a person you claim to love short of physical violence, I did to her.
The hell I put her through was – it was unimaginable. Looking back. I don’t know how she didn’t smother me in the night and that may make you chuckle, but it’s really not an exaggeration. I was that bad.
Years after we had split and after yet another one of my own breakups. I found myself looking back on my past relationships and all I saw was this long string of train wrecks. And I started wondering what is going on here. And so I decided to take a closer look at where things had really started going south for me. And for me, that was the very first relationship.
And so I went on this journey of trying to understand the way I treated her, the why behind my treatment, as well as the effect, uh, effect my actions had on her. And it was not, uh, easy. It was an uncomfortable process, and it took time for me to get to the bottom of everything. But in the end, taking that time to delve deep into it was the only way I was able to stop all of those abusive patterns that I was I was exhibiting, so that I never put anyone else in that situation again.
Fast forward to today, if I hadn’t taken the time to do all of that. I never would’ve been able to get past the first month with my wife and I absolutely would not trade my life with her for anything in the world. She’s the, she’s the bee’s knees, you know.
All of that being said, I admit there is validity to the first meme.
Um, while it’s important to evaluate your past, there is a fine line between healthy evaluation and unhealthy obsession. And I know that because in my journey, I have crossed that line several times and each time I’ve had to find a way to stop adjusting the rearview and focus on the road in front of me, um, to steer myself away from those cliffs, uh, so to speak.
And whether I did that on my own, or by reaching out to get help with a, a counselor, a therapist, uh, friends, you know, a random stranger on the internet, in a chat room, uh, whatever. Sometimes the only way for me to kind of work through things was to talk to someone about it.
So which one of these sayings has my vote as the best way to live your best life?
Um, I’d have to say that my answer is 42 . In other words, there’s no clear answer. In my opinion, we are so often encouraged by society to keep moving forward, to keep making progress, to never let the grass grow under our feet. And I have to say, I think that is a mistake. It’s a mistake to not take the time to examine and analyze and understand, because that’s how you learn.
You can’t do any of those things if you never stand still. It’s like, it’s like trying to take a picture of a rose while you’re running through a garden. If you don’t stop and focus the camera, you’re never gonna get that shot.
So taken at face value, neither of these things are sustainable indefinitely. You can’t always look forward and ignore the past, but you also can’t only look in the past and expect your present or your future to be a positive place that you wanna stay.
However, I do think that there is a sweet spot, uh, between the two it’s really, it’s all about balance. I encourage you to find your own balance because it’s different for all of us.
What do you think, which one of these sayings is the best way to live life? Or is it something in between? What do you do? I wanna know.
That’s all for today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, head over to podchaser.com/twistedthinking and leave a review. It really is the best way to support the show. Uh, if something I said caught your attention and you wanna continue the conversation, I invite you to join my discord server.
It’s free and easy to use. Just click on the link in the show notes. Big thanks to my patrons. Without them, none of this would be possible. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, be blessed and stay twisted.