Have you ever wanted a “do-over”? They’re really handy when we mess up, but when it’s someone else asking for a little mercy, it can pose more of a quandary.
Lately, I’ve been reading a book about relationships. So far the theme has been learning. The book suggests that one can learn from any situation, even the most negative. So when your husband blows off your anniversary, a do-over isn’t necessary really, but a heart open to learning is. And where do we start learning? We begin with ourselves. What bothers us? What are we afraid of? What do we want? And then we try to understand where the other person is.
Don’t get me wrong. This book I’m reading never implies we just let others mistreat us. It’s first response is to understand why we’d even consider letting someone else mistreat us, and from that understanding we can move forward.
Maybe the key to today’s question is not the “second chances” part, but the word “think”. And maybe we shouldn’t stop with just the “what”, but also ask why we think the way we do, where did we learn these things, and when did we come to these conclusions. Not thinking about what scares us and why we do the things we do, keeps us stagnant. So maybe gaining some kind of understanding and insight is the point in all the junk that comes our way.
And on that note we fall to the “second chances” part of the question. Being given a second chance implies the hope that we learned something the first time around. Take heart and don’t lose hope, the potential to learn and grow comes in every situation, and when we keep finding ourselves in the same rut, making some of the same mistakes, that can be yet another chance to learn, move forward and leave the old stuff behind.
