The Power of Yesterday

Yesterday is good for something.

You can't have a better tomorrow if you're thinking about yesterday all the time.

Charles Kettering

I am sure you must have encountered driving on roads, either by doing it yourself or being on the passenger's seat. Now picture a driver driving to a desired destination, and the only mirror he is checking or focusing on is his rearview mirror. Such a driver would get to his destination swifter and smoother, right?

Wrong!

It wouldn't take long for him to either run into a fence, fall into a ditch, or worst, run a passersby over, damaging himself, his property, someone else's property, or someone else's life.

It sounds pretty stupid for a driver to focus on his side mirror unless he's reversing or trying to negotiate a bend or a turn, isn't it? Even when he's negotiating to turn, he only just needs to look and look back, not focus on his rearview. Which leaves alone the fact that, the only provision for a driver to focus completely on his rearview mirror is if he is reversing; moving backwards.

We agree how stupid it is to focus on your rearview mirror when you are moving forward on the road, but many of us in life do it. We do it so well it even seems so philosophical, so wise!

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We live life focusing on our rearview mirror, focusing on all the things that has happened in the past and letting those things dictate what we think about other people, how we feel, what we do here and now, and invariably our future.

We focus so squarely that on what happened to us and how we've become victims of our experiences, letting those experiences negatively colour who we are right now and what we invariably become in the future, robbing us of all the potentials in the present.

I am sure that you've heard the famous saying, "Don't live life in the rearview," meaning don't live your life in the past, and I completely subscribe to this.

Regardless of this, however, I want to bring to our attention that the past; yesterday, is good for something.

Yesterday has power, and if we harness the power in it, we can birth something truly tremendous out of our lives today.

The power of yesterday is its ability to teach. Yesterday has lived all that it can, there are no longer potentials therein.

The best way we can use its power is to learn from it, learn from it of the things that we will do differently and how we can live better for today. But many people mistake learning for living, and instead of learning from yesterday, they dwell on it, live in it, and conduct themselves and other people today as if they were in yesterday.

This is why many people never let go of the hurt and pain and betrayals and failures that they had to endure and experience in the past. It's because they are still living there, and letting the present slip by without doing anything and being anything in the present; the only place it matters.

We let yesterday use up too much of today, such that when we are now finally ready to make use of today, it's already become yesterday, and the circle keeps on like that until we catch ourselves.

Don't wait for today to become yesterday before you're ready to make the most of it. It wouldn't matter then.

There are many of us who live life in the rear view, living yesterday in today, and only living today when it becomes yesterday. We aren't using the power of yesterday this way. Instead, we are letting the power of yesterday snuff the life out of our very existence.

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Yesterday is good for the learning, but even then, you must ensure that it doesn't completely color the experiences you have now and the life that you should be living. You should never make all your decisions based on your experiences of yesterday, because it would then mean that you'd have to attach an experience to a false equivalence.

What this means is that, when you meet someone new, completely different from who you've met before, someone whose values and believes and ideologies are vastly different, you begin to project the experiences, feelings, and the pain you felt from a past hurt onto this person who may never even have make you feel that way in light years. False equivalence.

What you are doing is living in the past and letting it color every single thing, instead of learning from it, learning how you can be better from it.

The right way to learn from the past, the right way to harness the power of yesterday is to learn from the lens of your own self, your own attitude, your own character, competence, and capacity, not someone else's.

In a relationship, instead of projecting other people's failures and how much they've hurt you onto other innocent people you've just met, use the power of yesterday as a reflection of your own being. Which means, instead of thinking, "This is who you potentially are," which would be projecting upon someone else what the last person did; think instead, "This is who I was when I let that happen. This is who I am and can be now." That way, you have used the power of yesterday correctly, because the only common factor in your new relationship is you, and projecting the behavior of two individuals who may never be related upon one another would be a false equivalence.

The only common factor in your new relationship is you. Selah!

The same way in your work, business, or career, when you fail, or a line of business falters and falls flat to the ground, or a project comes out disappointingly, or the exam didn't go as well as you wish it would have gone, the right way to use the power of yesterday and learn from it is to learn of all you could have done better and how you will do better in the present moment, not how other forces that played a role could have done.

If you look back at yesterday and all you can think of is how your teammates let you down, how the referee was a twat, how your customers didn't show up for you, how your car broke down on the way to work which invariably got you fired, how the examiners didn't set questions that were within the scope, you would have never learned anything.

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Finally, you know you have used the power of yesterday correctly if you feel no pain, no unforgiveness towards a person, no hatred towards anything, and finally, no regret. At this point, you've learned the right way, you have harnessed the power of yesterday, and now is the time to live in the now, utilising all its powers and potentials.

Or has nobody else told you? Now is the best place to live in.

Let's talk next week.

To your growth,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨