If you have a car, you don’t lecture it about the past. If your car gets a flat tire, you fix it. You don’t keep blaming the car for the flat tire. You do not admonish the car. If your car runs out of gas, you fill the tank. You avert driving without gas. If your car is parked, and another car rams into yours, you don’t attribute the fault to your car, your driving, your skill. You do not avoid parking your car in the future. You do not keep thinking about it. You don’t go over it again and again about how, if you had parked your car somewhere else, this would not have happened. You do not relive it, rethink, or, furthermore, base the rest of your driving on that accident that you were innocent of.

Let us go further, for an example, and say that you had parked your car outside the white line. Maybe you didn’t see the white line. Maybe you didn’t know you were to park your car between the curb and the white line. Maybe you knew and let it be anyway for you were only going to park there a few moments. Whatever the reason, whether you were or were not to some degree responsible, the point is that you don’t let this one accident affect your entire driving career. You don’t, do you? You move on from it. You are very aware that the past is not the present, and you don’t use all your resources and energy to keep the past – like a motor – running.

Yet when it comes to your life, you may well keep too much of the past running into the future. You heap up the past as if it were an online class. In your attempt to not make the same errors, even if the errors were not yours, it seems you hark to the past. You somehow replay yourself, and you may seem unable to get off the track. You were the oldest of five, or you were the youngest of five, and you may repeat your role as the oldest or as the youngest. You just can’t seem to get out of it.

Better to think of yourself as born anew today. Recreate yourself. Your birth order, your heritage, your parents, your DNA are not the entire making of you. They are not unless you say so. All the reasons why you attribute the way you are are excuses, beloveds. You can point to all the justices or injustices of the past, and, still, you are responsible for who you are today. No one else is. The past is not. Even if you have made the most powerful map of the effect of your past on you, even if scientists have drawn such a map, even if it is proven a hundred different ways from Monday that you are not responsible, you are responsible for who you are now. No matter how favored or unfavored you were by the world and happenstance, you are responsible. You did or did not get out of the past. If you do not like how you function in the world, then it is up to you to function differently.

No matter the factors, they can be changed. You can change them. I have said before that you are your own prince who comes to the rescue. Or you are the villain who whisks you off to your own dismay.

We are not talking about blame. Blame is always something from the past. We are talking about responsibility, and responsibility is always now. Whatever you would like changed, you can change it. Occasionally, by the snap of a finger, change is made, yet more often by a decision you make, a vision you take on, a new road you take, a new way of standing, looking, incurring.

There are things worth changing. If you are not happy with yourself as you are now, or not happy with your life as it is now and that likely is many or most of the populace, then create happiness. Happiness, like anything else, does not have to be an accident. Decide that your fate is happiness, and bring happiness on.