When I sit down with a student, I find myself asking questions that I think will help us both ‘right the ship so to speak’.  Some questions I ask are “How do you think you got here”?; “What specifically happened or contributed to your current situation”?; “What are some steps you can take to BETTER your current situation”?

Sometimes students do not know the answers right away and need additional coaxing or questioning to get to the answers.  I tell students they can’t go back and change the steps they took that resulted with them being in the specific predicament they’re in now.  But they can learn from those consequences or mistakes and carry them into each new choice they make moving forward.

Ironically, I find myself in a similar position and am asking myself SIMILAR questions.  If someone sat me down right now and asked me those questions, I would be able to offer several answers to explain my current circumstance(s).  I don’t need additional prompting or questioning to help figure out which steps or decisions I made that led me to this point.  I don’t need it because I’m already aware of several choices I made that led me to where I am now.  I already know too that I can’t go back and change those mistakes.  I can only move forward and try to make better choices and decisions now.  Use the lessons I have learned from the past and try to do and be better.  But the hardest challenge for me is that not only do I have to think about the consequences of my choices personally, but I have to think about how they affected my family.

And no, I may not have been thinking about how my choices might affect my family back then, in the moment, but that is something I will have to live with.  I choose now to live in the present day.  I choose to not dwell on the past or those choices or mistakes.  I have to focus on what can I do right here, right now.  What is it that I need to do right now to be the best version of life for my family?!

I learned as a child, growing up in a Catholic Church, that it is normal to make mistakes (sin) because we are only human and often fallible.  What matters is that we ask for forgiveness and make changes to those ‘sinful’ behaviors, or learn from those mistakes, so as to not do them again.  And sometimes we don’t learn from those mistakes the first or second time; maybe we don’t learn from those mistakes until the fourth time.

But the point is that the a lesson has been learned, and changes have been implemented.  On the other hand, sometimes the changes that need to be implemented come a little too late.  Of course, that isn’t a good thing, because implementing the change is too late and the damage has already been done.  But, do you sit down and let life stay in that damaging moment?  Or do you move forward and work to be better?

It is ok to move on from situations that no longer provide you with valuable lessons.  Maybe you have exhausted all possible avenues to take in order to rectify the situation.  Maybe it is ok to decide to take a new path because this one has been traveled for too long.   And sometimes, maybe it is ok to give up and/or walk away…