Flourishing Life | Personal Development | Change Article Archive | Creating a New Life

Creating a New Life

We can rewrite our story

BY: T. Franklin Murphy | January 14, 2019 (edited January 2, 2022)

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The first steps into a new life are arduous, full of challenge and discouragement. Keep going; it gets easier.

Tomorrow is a new day—a clean slate. A quaint idea, erasing culpability for yesterday. While tomorrow will be weighted with the poor decision of the past, it can be a new beginning. A new day where we can make better choices.

"To live without Hope is to Cease to live."
Fyodor Dostoevsky

We have the Power to Change

We can change the trajectory of our life. We are challenged to accept the present with the marks and bruises from yesterday. Our experience today adds wisdom to face tomorrow; each day we have more exposure to life. We make choices tomorrow with a wider foundation than the day before. Each day’s actions expands and contract choices available later.

The present is precious. Yesterday still exists regardless of new commitments. Someone who persistently spends twenty-years planning for retirement has more opportunities at sixty than someone who newly begins planning for retirement at age fifty, squandering resources for several decades.

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We Must Maintain Hope

Don't give up. Don't accept your current lot in life. We must hope there is more out there. We can no longer squander our opportunities. If we have no hope, we have nothing. Life isn't fair, agreed; but we can escape some of the unfairness, bringing more to game than others. We can surmount the challenges.

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all."
Emily Dickinson

Changing Trajectories

Changing a trajectory takes work. Life follows the momentum—power not easily redirected. We can’t erase a history of wrongs with a few rights. We will continue to experience residual effects from the past; but as we move forward, change begins. New choices shape the future. New opportunities arise. New habits form. New trajectories take hold and life is new.

There is a point in the courageous journey of change—the tipping point; the accumulation of new choices eventually out-weighs the past. Changes begin to gain traction and a new live emerges from the rubble. Many give up before the tipping point. The fight is too much, slipping back to old routines and familiar consequences.

See Tipping Point for more on this topic

Courage! Patience! Persistence! You can make it, and it’s worth it.

*Article written in loving admiration for my son's courageous fight against heroin addiction and for all those engage in similar battles.

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T. Franklin Murphy

Wellness. Writer. Researcher.
T. Franklin Murphy has a degree in psychology. He tirelessly researches scientific findings that contribute to wellness. In 2010, he began publishing his findings.