I have been blessed to be a part of this online community called Deep Underground Poetry. It is an online community of poets and writers. You can post your work and get critique. They also host competitions. One of these competitions was for visual poetry and the theme was hindsight. The contest description was “Think back to a difficult time in your life. What would you say to yourself? Or what do you wish someone had said to you at the time.” One of the things I talked about within my piece is to not look back. I remember a post about leaving the past in the past or letting go of the past. That is more or less what I am talking about but the metaphor I would like to use in this case is the rearview mirror. I remember when I posted that piece on DUP and one of my comments on that was “That’s why the windshield is always bigger than the rearview or side mirrors.” I thought to myself that is so true. So one of my metaphors has become to not look back and to stop looking in the rearview mirror because we are not going that way.
I am not saying that we do not learn anything from the past or anything like that because we still do, but we cannot continue to look back when there is so much ahead of this. That is especially important when we go through our difficult times. It is why I never like focusing on the past. It keeps us distracted from where we are going and that is what in part this quote says. “Even thought there are days I wish I could change some things in the past, there’s a reason the rear view mirror is so small and the windshield is so big, where you’re headed is much more important than what you’ve left behind.” That quote is so true because although we want to go back and change things we should not. They are a part of our journey and mistakes give us lessons learned. There will be a post about lessons and mistakes some other time, but the lesson if we were to talk them right here is to essentially look forward instead of backwards. That is what I would highly recommend to my readers as well.
I hope that all of my readers can take this advice and find a way to move forward with their lives. If we are so busy looking backwards and into the rearview mirror then we cannot see what is ahead of us. There is this quote that I love by C.S. Lewis. He says “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” In other words, we look ahead because there might be better things there than what we leave behind. That is why we try to forget the past as much as we can, especially the painful parts. I know that I keep talking about the past, but I keep talking about it because of its importance. I am doing something a little different here and including one of my visual poems, which pretty much text over an image. The photo was taken on a drive my roommate I decided to go on when we needed a break from studying. I hope everybody enjoys something slightly different from me this time. Cheers!!
