Reset, do over, or just keep moving forward?

Have you ever looked at your life, where you’re at, and wished you could reach out and hit some sort of reset button? Or maybe just call out “do over!” and get a chance to start things over at a certain point? It’s a new year, a time when folks have resolutions on their mind. Starting over with a fresh year. So yea, the idea of resetting is often appealing.

When I started looking at doing this post, the idea of resetting is what I had in mind. Especially having seemingly done so in so many parts of my own life over the last year. Picking up and moving from Minnesota to Washington is just about as close to resetting my life as I could get. But as I sit here thinking more about it, it’s really less about resetting and more about… growing. Making decisions about where I want to go, from here.

Resetting implies that I want to make different decisions than I did before, and while I may or may not be entirely happy with some decisions I’ve made in the past, if I were to go back and make different ones, there is no promise that things would have turned out any “better” for me.

Now, as I said, some of the decisions I’ve made have not been without their downside. While moving out here has led to a number of great things for me, it’s also taken me away from my friends and family, I had to leave the radio program I was having so much fun being a part of, and trying to get myself, my life, established out here has taken my focus away from things here, with Positively Healthy.

But the positives, have also been incredible. Enough so, that I can find ways to … to deal with the negatives.

I keep in touch with my family on the phone, online video chats, and the like. I’m working on my own online radio/podcasting efforts, and the time away has allowed me to give some thought to just what it is I want to do with things here, at Positively Healthy (which I’ll be sharing more and more of in the coming weeks).

I think this idea, the appeal of a do over, or a reset, stems in part from our very nature to focus on the negative, despite all the positive we have around us. When you are making healthy changes and are losing weight, say 20 pounds so far, and you have some tough times, and maybe regain 4-5 pounds of that, how many of you get upset and maybe even obsess over that regained few pounds? It’s so easy to do, and to our own detriment it totally ignores the fact that there were 15 pounds that we have still kept off.

Yes, it is discouraging, and we can’t, nor should we simply ignore it. And as we take a look at those things that maybe led to it, I don’t think we need to do so in terms of wishing we could hit that reset button, but rather in terms of what we can learn from the situation as we continue to move forward from here.

So my resolution for 2015, if you wish to think of it as one, is to continue to move forward. I can acknowledge my past without wishing I could change it, because everything I have done has led me to being where I am right now, to being who I am right now. And that’s exactly who I need to be right now. Because it is the person I am right now that is going to help shape who I become tomorrow.