Love poems are sweet but for Valentine Day this year, an increasing number of zoos offered people the chance to name creatures after those who'd spurned them in love. An El Paso Zoo allowed people to name a cockroach after their ex and feed it to meerkats. At Sydney Zoo, visitors entered a competition to name a highly venomous brown snake after an ex-lover. Entrants had to explain to the zoo what their ex did to earn a snake being named after them.
Sometimes people dwell on the things that happened years ago.
Do you wish you could press the rewind button so you could redo portions of your life? Do you struggle with major regrets about your past? Do you spend a lot of time wondering how life would have turned out if you had chosen a slightly different path? Do you replay past memories in your mind like a scene from a movie over and over again?
Although self-reflection is healthy, dwelling can prevent us from enjoying the present. Ruminating on the past won't change it. It can be a vicious cycle that keeps you stuck in the same emotional state.
Just this week, I cleared the clutters in my office drawers. That physical act helped me see that some things in my past need to be discarded; some things need to be kept and cherished.
I try to make peace with the past. I had endured hard lessons and now I try to focus instead on what I've learned from that experience. When I do think of negative events, which can be very distressing, I walk myself through the facts and details of the memory, instead of dwelling on how I felt.
One word of caution: this is easier said than done. Like any skill, this gets easier the more you do it. I am slowly beginning to get better at letting go of unresolved pain, little by little.
Sometimes people dwell on the things that happened years ago.
Do you wish you could press the rewind button so you could redo portions of your life? Do you struggle with major regrets about your past? Do you spend a lot of time wondering how life would have turned out if you had chosen a slightly different path? Do you replay past memories in your mind like a scene from a movie over and over again?
Although self-reflection is healthy, dwelling can prevent us from enjoying the present. Ruminating on the past won't change it. It can be a vicious cycle that keeps you stuck in the same emotional state.
Just this week, I cleared the clutters in my office drawers. That physical act helped me see that some things in my past need to be discarded; some things need to be kept and cherished.
I try to make peace with the past. I had endured hard lessons and now I try to focus instead on what I've learned from that experience. When I do think of negative events, which can be very distressing, I walk myself through the facts and details of the memory, instead of dwelling on how I felt.
One word of caution: this is easier said than done. Like any skill, this gets easier the more you do it. I am slowly beginning to get better at letting go of unresolved pain, little by little.
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