Past - RodneyOlsen.net

I love this video.

It’s a video that took over 20 years to make and it features 32 year old filmmaker Jeremiah McDonald and a 12 year old Jeremiah McDonald. It’s really a clever few minutes of the filmmaker talking to the younger version of himself via videotape. You can check out a few more details on the story at News.com.au

I’m a fair bit older than 32 but if I had the opportunity to talk to a 12 year old Rodney Olsen I wonder what advice I would give him. If I could go back to the mid-seventies and give my ‘young self’ some life advice, what would I say?

I think I’d tell him not to worry about the small stuff so much. I’d also tell him to cultivate a strong reading habit.

Some of my strongest advice would be in the area of faith. I’d recommend that he stay as close to God as he could and to learn how to lean on him through the good and the hard times.

I’d tell him to make the most of his relationship with his mother because he’d only have her around until his early twenties. (Thankfully I did have a great relationship with mum, but she still passed away far too soon.)

One of the things I’d be sure to say is to make sure you take lots of risks. Not reckless risks that would endanger him or others, but risks that ensure that he didn’t ever wonder ‘what would have happened if only ….’.

I’d tell him to treasure every relationship.

I’m sure that there would be plenty to tell that young boy. There are lessons that I’ve had to learn the hard way that would have been easier if someone had the right words to say back then.

Overall, I don’t have many regrets but I certainly wouldn’t want to go back and do it all over again. I’ve had a pretty good life so far and while it’s almost certain that I’ve passed the half way mark already, I still feel as if life is just beginning in some ways. I’m also finding that a lot of the advice that I would give that young boy is the kind of advice that I’m giving or need to give to the two young lives God has entrusted to me now.

If you could go back and give some advice to yourself when you were very young, what would you say?

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The Daily Mail has recently published the results of a survey that says people spend around 44 minutes every week on regretting our past.

We wish we’d saved more money, traveled more, stayed in touch with friends and that we’d never started smoking. (I’m thankful that smoking is something I’ll never have to regret. Having a father who was a heavy smoker was enough to convince me to never even try lighting up.)

I guess that among the regrets that people identified, there are some things that we can change for our future and others that we need to leave behind so we can move on. Regrets can paralyze us and keep us living in the past yet if we live without some sense of regret we won’t learn the life lessons that arise and we’re destined to keep repeating the same mistakes.

The Top Ten

The top ten regrets were:

1. Not having saved more money
2. Not having worked harder at school
3. Not having exercised more
4. Not seeing more of the world
5. Taking up smoking
6. Not staying in touch with people more
7. Not having taken more care of our bodies when younger
8. Not having appreciated an elderly relative more before he or she passed away
9. Not having taken more photos of experiences growing up
10. Getting married too early.

When I look at that list I can give a nod to a few but I won’t let them keep me wishing for what might have been. We all make mistakes but we need to acknowledge those mistakes, take appropriate action, then move forward. Sometimes we need to forgive others and other times we need to accept the forgiveness that we’ve been offered.

Can you identify with any of the regrets listed or do you have regrets of your own? Do you spend a lot of time thinking of how differently life could have been or are you using past mistakes to learn and move on? Are there some regrets that just won’t let you move on?

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Tag - Past