"It's never too late to have a joyful childhood."
- James McPartland
Sometimes the most difficult person to get to know is ourselves. And it is often the case that other Since the early stage of our existence sets the direction for our lives, we are each powerfully influenced by our experiences as children. Research shows that by the time we are somewhere between the ages of 6 and 8, we have unconsciously designed the course of our own future. In other words, when we evaluate our lives, most of us come to realize that we have been taking instructions from a six-year-old that resides somewhere deep inside of us.
After the carefree infant to toddler (and then to early childhood) period, when we engage life without fear, we suddenly are forced to learn that there is right and wrong, good and bad. The impact of specific events teach us that we must protect ourselves from the wrong and the bad. This learning can cause us to memorize the unhealthy, unhappy or painful points from our past.
While this pattern of remembrance may have been an attempt to protect us in the future, these memorized experiences generate an early warning system and we essentially end up projecting our past onto the future. Until we realize the frequency with which we do this, we will continue to see the past repeat and thus further deepen our unhappy memories.
The good news is that at any point in time we can rewrite our future by re-creating our past. If we look close enough we can find many happy memories, playful moments, truly meaningful events, and a joyful childhood that we may have forgotten existed. We can choose to have a fresh perspective and create a joyous set of memories of when we lived our lives as little people. We can even go so far as to project that past happiness onto our future.
This shouldn’t be too hard since we already know how to put our past into our future and get more of the same. We just need to change the ingredient (how we see it) inside the formula, in order to create a more inspiring future... one based on our new perspective of the past.
So this holiday season, when the plentitude of friends and family are upon us, let’s choose happy memories, friends!
