Shining Thru

I was reading a list of memorable quotes listed by USA Today and one of the quotes caught my attention…

“Obviously a major malfunction.”

Steve Nesbitt, NASA public affairs officer, Jan. 28, 1986, shortly after the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

I feel like this quote can be applied to how we feel when looking at something that happens in life.  Sometimes you can only look at a situation and say “oh shit”…..I mean, really, what else is there to say?  It’s done, over with, a major malfunction in the plans that you had set forth and were going well until that point.  But now it’s in the past, you might not even be sure what went wrong, it probably doesn’t matter what went wrong, it simply did, and now you have a mess.  Just like the pieces of the space shuttle, floating out into open space.

Sometimes a moment catches you so off guard that it’s like it happens in slow motion, or in a daze, or just replays over and over in your head…and there is still nothing to say other than….it’s obviously a major malfunction.  Nothing more…nothing less….what else is there to say at that point?

If you could change the past what moment would you choose to change?  Not just in your life time, but if you could change one event in all of the world’s history what would it be?  How could you possibly know the outcome of that choice?  Would it be worth possibly erasing your own existence from the earth?  What if the moment you choose, even if it is centuries ago, is the moment that makes it so that your parents never meet and therefore you are never born?

If we had time machines, I am afraid that people would jump into them without ever seriously considering the fact that they might screw up their chances of ever existing, or change the world completely….what if that is what somebody wants…a whole new existence?  I think that many people would jump into the past and think it was pretty awesome to be there, myself included, but what if they just wanted to change one thing….then what?

How would you ever choose what one thing you wanted to change in history?  Everyone’s perspective is different, because everyone has been affected by the outcome of events in a different way…The impact of a single event may mean nothing to someone from NYC in the United States, but might be everything to a whole village in China…

We never know how the events of history have formed because we weren’t there…but what if we could go back and see for ourselves how things came about?  Would we want to change them?

Why do people worry about what is in the past when there is no way to change it?  Why try to change something that is unchangeable?  Regret serves no purpose.  Instead of spending all of the time regretting the past, I wish more people would simply examine the past with an open mind and learn from it to make the future better.  Why try to undo what is already done while the future is still undecided.  The future can still be changed.  The future still hangs in the balance.  People are spending all of their time regretting the past and that only leads to not paying enough attention to the present or where things will go from where, which leads to more regrets.

I feel bad for people that live in the past instead of the present.  Although there are some people who don’t consider the present enough because they are so focused on the future…it’s like they fail to realize that we can’t get to the future without the present and that all of the choices we make now are the choices to keep them on the path to the future they want.  I know we don’t have complete control over anything like that…but why worry about what’s not right here???

“Forget Regret, or Life is yours to Miss.”  I really like this line from the musical Rent.  I think it says a lot about how we should all live our life.  I know that I have gotten caught up in personal guilt, worry, regret, and wondering “what if”….We don’t have time for all of that.  We have right now, and right now is a result of everything that has happened in the past yes, but how we live right now is what makes up the future so why screw up the future by worrying about what you did in the past….it’s in the past, this is now, this is what we need to concentrate on. 

No one ever guaranteed us tomorrow…..so we can’t worry about what will happen in the future, just as we can’t worry about the past…if we spend our whole life worrying, we’re not living.  Let yesterday be, because it’s in the past, and take care of tomorrow when it’s today.  No need to worry about tomorrow when you need to live today, you need to make decisions today…yes those decisions may affect the rest of your life, but if we spend so much time worrying about the consequences of one decision, we’ll miss out on the opportunity all together. 

In an effort to not think about the situation that we are in some people avoid thinking too deeply by living in the past,  walking down memory lane all of the time, or dive into one aspect of their life like work or a hobby…just to avoid thinking about whatever thing they don’t want to acknowledge fully in their life…most of us have something. 

Living in the moment seems like a simply theory, a great way to live…but we all know there is more to it than that.  I wish it was that easy.  Unfortunately most of us are aware that our life is linked to many other lives and that our decisions have an affect on all of those people.  It’s also true that sometimes we can’t control the “what ifs” that go through our minds.  But we can control how much time we dwell on these things…sometimes we need to look ahead or remember the past, but we can’t forget to live the right now, right here….