While living through the most transformative period of your life, you must learn to let things go.
Letting go involves relinquishing an attachment to desires, outcomes, or expectations, whether it’s related to a bad grade, rejection, or anything that’s happened in the past. At the core of letting go lies the acceptance of the way things are.
As university students, we’re all at a stage of our lives where the decisions we make will greatly influence the course of our future. Our career paths, future relationships, and habits are being shaped by our daily practices—it’s unwise to expend so much energy worrying about what has been, when we should be focused on shaping what can be.
Upon receiving a subpar grade, I used to find myself dwelling on it for weeks, thinking about how this number was going to ruin my life and keep me from accomplishing my goals. The inability to let go kept me in this cyclical pattern of sadness, guilt, and anger, until the futility of my own actions ed.
There’s little sense in worrying about what’s already happened if it can’t be changed.
No amount of moping or stressing could make me go back in time to where I wrote that essay. No amount of regret could get my past self to cite that one extra reading or write a more engaging hook. However, understanding where I went wrong and learning to apply that to future situations provides something progressive and transformative.
Beating yourself up about something that’s already happened has little to no benefit—it won’t change your past actions, and you almost always have more important things to be focusing on in the moment. Give yourself the peace and forgiveness to move on and be better, next time.
Letting go applies to almost all aspects of life, whether you’re an athlete, a student, or a hopeless romantic.
Aidan is a fourth-year History student and The Journal’s Senior Sports Editor.
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