October 8, 2026- We don’t need to erase the past

Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past, but you can never erase it.

~EB White

No matter how much we would love to erase our past, we cannot. In fact, we must not. If we erase our past, we erase ourselves, as we are a product of that past.

Just because our past may not be all that beautiful, doesn’t mean that we can’t be. We have overcome hardship, remained resilient through failure, gotten up after falling. We could not be the steel we are today without exposure to the heat of yesterday.

Have we made some choices we are not proud of? Have we given something less than our best effort? Have we come up short when everything was in place for us to succeed? Have we chosen to put our time and energy into the wrong relationships? We’ve probably done all of those things, yet here we are, on the other side of it, still surviving.

We can be proud of who and what we are without being proud of everything we’ve done and experienced. Our past is better off left there, but it was formative. It shaped us into today’s version of ourselves.

We don’t need to wish we did things differently; we have more choices in front of us. Let’s use what we’ve learned to help make new choices that will serve us. We don’t need to erase the past to honor the future.