Farewell to Yesterday

There is no shortage of useless words. I’d like to say as a writer that every word is necessary and important and meaningful, but I do have a list of words that will never be used and are therefore deemed useless. By me, anyway.

Crewel work. I haven’t used that or heard of it since I lost a spelling bee in 7th grade. I did, however, win a spelling bee in 6th grade with Mediterranean. Go effin figure. The only difference, in my opinion,  is that Mediterranean is familiar and crewel work is not used by anyone ever and at the time I had never heard, read, or spoken of any such word. In fact, if not for the loss I would probably still be living a grand old life without the words “crewel work”.

Either way, neither of my attempts at being crowned spelling bee champ have made any difference in my life. Neither the win nor the loss means anything, except that I know I can spell. It doesn’t go on a resume and frankly, no one cares when an almost 40  year old woman says she was in a spelling bee in 6th grade. In fact, it’s even a little weird.

Yay for Yesterday

I had an ex that constantly focused on his greatness from 10 years earlier. True, it was a much bigger deal than my winning/losing any spelling bee and in the beginning I feigned fascination. Don’t do that by the way. If you don’t think it’s an amazing feat, don’t pretend like you’re in awe, because you’ll hear about it every time something goes down. In the end, I finally did spit out that no one gave a rat’s ass about what he did 10 years earlier. Out of anger mostly, and since we were being honest with each other…

In fact, after thinking about this, I have realized that I had quite a few exes that seemed to wallow in their past greatness. As if they did their job a long time ago and now the shift was over and that was that. Further, it seemed to be just my unfortunate damn luck that at one time they were something but I managed to catch them at nothingness. They didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t care about their somethingness or nothingness. All I ever care about is that things are moving forward.

Because it doesn’t matter to me if you were once a billionaire, if today you don’t have a nickel.

It doesn’t matter if you were Elvis yesterday if you are Daffy Duck today.

Just keep it moving along. All I’m saying.

Blame it on Yesterday

The problem with focusing on accomplishments and failures of yesterday is that in both cases, it gives a lot of people an excuse to stand still. Loitering their lives a way, I’d call it. Just hanging around using up oxygen (oxygen thieves as my friend used to say).

My life was rotten growing up. Therefore I’ll act as I choose now. I absolutely cannot stand this. If you want to completely ruin my day you can a) ask me why I’m single or b) blame something you did today on something that happened to you yesterday. Bad, horrible things happen to people. There is a point in which we need to let go of that.

or

I did something amazing a long time ago, so I’m pretty much done with doing amazing stuff for the rest of my life. Uh, seriously. Unless you’ve cured cancer there’s a whole lot of amazing stuff to be done on the Amazing Stuff To Do list.

Forget about Yesterday

It’s all about today. And if you’re lucky, tomorrow is another chance to get it right. A second chance at amazing-ness. Which means that I can neither focus on my spelling bee attempts nor the mistakes that I’ve made, nor the things that have happened to me. My guilt is giving way too much importance to yesterday. Somehow we have to figure out a way to move forward because I would imagine that it’s an extremely uneventful and stagnant life if all you can think of is yesterday. Yesterday is gone. Can’t change it or bring it back.

We have our memories, our regrets, the things we’ve learned and the experiences that make us who we are. Maybe if it is at all helpful, occasionally we share those things with others. At the end of the day though, you can’t live on it. You may own today. But no one owns yesterday.

No one.

“If you’re still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today” ~Joyce Chapman