The title probably has you thinking that this is going to be a religious piece with the sole purpose of talking about how much I love God and how much being a believer has drastically changed the course of my life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pieces like that, however that is simply not the purpose of this one.

Spiritual ideologies aside, there are some unspoken general life rules that help guide us to grow in a positive direction. One of these rules is essentially to learn from your mistakes, or “Always clean up after yourself.”

To clean up after yourself requires that you look at whatever happened objectively and determine where things went wrong and how things could have been handled better. Based on that, you theoretically don’t make the same mistake again.

The most important part of cleaning up is the application of this to your life. If you just sit back and acknowledge that you messed up but don’t actually make any changes in your life, how are you going to grow? There’s no actual cleaning happening if you don’t proceed accordingly to what you’ve learned, it’s more like dusting it a little bit and pretending it doesn’t bother you.

As imperfect human beings, we have a tendency to make a mess of things.

Sometimes we have a “what’s done is done” attitude and just leave our issues behind so that we don’t have to think about them anymore. The issue with that is, there is no growth. There is nothing making you do or feel better. On top of that, you still have to deal with the negative aspects of whatever happened and it was all for nothing.

The way I see it, what’s the point of experiencing something unpleasant (whether self-induced or not) if you can’t turn it into something positive?

Sometimes we live for excuses. We have an “it wasn’t my fault” attitude just so that we can place the issues elsewhere and avoid them entirely. Or we just choose to not think about the different scenarios where it could have been our fault and chalk it up to bad timing, etc.

Obviously there is the possibility that you haven’t done anything wrong, and in that case keep doing what you’re doing. The whole purpose of cleaning is assessing the situation and proceeding appropriately. If you’ve made a mess you fix it by learning from it and making an active effort to avoid the same mistake again. It’s painful and can often be rather unpleasant to face what you’ve done head on like that, but I still feel like I’m better off now than I was before, and it has been much easier to move forward with my life, and in a better direction.

Sometimes we make the same mistakes over and over again before we even realize that we’ve been doing it. That’s okay. Everything is a learning opportunity.

In every stage of life, someone has done something that could have been handled better. What defines you, however, is not how you deal with the situation the first time, but how you grow from it and handle trouble in the future.