DTH-X-0011
“I feel like I wasted years of my life and I can't get them back.”
You cannot retrieve lost time. But the years you still have are not diminished by the ones you spent poorly. The awareness that time is finite means the time in front of you has just become more valuable, not less. Grief over the past is reasonable. Living in it, however, costs you the present.
Your Practice
Write one sentence about each of those years: what you learned from them, even if the lesson was hard. Then write one sentence about today: one thing you can do right now that the person from those years would have wanted to do. Do that thing. The wasted years are over. Today is not.
The Architects
“So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.”
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, Chapter I (John W. Basore translation; Wikisource)