"If you knew everything was really all right, and that it always has a happy ending, then you would not feel trepidacious about your future. Everything is really so very all right! If you could believe and trust that, then, immediately everything would automatically and instantly become all right."
--- Abraham-Hicks
We've all been there, right? Where we go back to a time when we were happier - maybe a previous relationship that is no longer, or a place we lived, or a time when we studied abroad, or a time when our beloved or our parents were still alive. We all go back to moments that live in our memory and are sometimes hard to leave. And it's natural, right?
It was a time we liked, a time we hope returns, a time where we knew exactly the who, what where, when and how because we lived it. It was a tangible reality.
And we stay there sometimes because the reality we are now facing is not so knowable. We knew we had good times. We knew we were in love. But will we be again? We don't know.
So, the first thing I want to say is, if you find yourself going there and maybe going there more often then you'd like, cut yourself some slack. We're all looking for our happy place.
But the truth is, if you're reading this, your life is clearly not over and presumably, you still have a few things to look forward to.
My dad who is a charming senior and a very pragmatic man is planning a trip with my mother to China. They just returned from a trip to Australia and once they got home and settled into the mundane, he got active again on the internet. He told me, "When you're my age, you have to plan things to look forward to."
And it's sage advice at any age. But the thing is, planning things to look forward to requires our participation.
So, how do we move from reminiscing about the past to being optimistic about our future?
The way to begin, is the same way it begins with many other things. It starts with our self.
It begins with recognizing, first of all, that our past and our happy place included us. We lived it and therefore we are capable of living it again. We were a part of creating a fabulous relationship, the lucrative business deal, the perfect publisher, or the trip abroad. And we - the essence of who we are - is still alive and well and waiting for us to get off the couch and create something new.
But we can't move forward if we're always looking in the rearview mirror. We have to look ahead at some point otherwise we end up in a ditch. And that's another kind of stuck place.
The second way it begins with us is by knowing what we want. Joseph Campbell says, "Follow your bliss and doors will be open for you where there were only walls".
We forget sometimes the very important fact that what precipitated the time before this very reminiscent past is the same place we are in now - we didn't know then, how it would come about either. But we went to a museum or joined a writing group or took up tango, or went to a poetry reading, or volunteered at our favoriate charity or showed up for the audition and as a result, our life changed.
And it can again if we stop long enough to remind ourselves that the future we are afraid of could also be the past we are reminiscing about . And that with the same forward action on our part, things could change in a day, a week, a month, or a second.
So, then the question becomes, why aren't we doing that? Why aren't we moving forward?
I'll tell you why. Because what if we can't re-create that lovely relationship, or duplicate that business success? Or what if we can't shave 20 years off our lives and be who we were at 30. What if all of our past was just a fluke, just a chance stroke of luck?
Well, maybe it was, but I'll tell you something else. We will never know if we don't move forward to find out.
There have been many who are wishing at 40 that they had the body they had at 30. And then 50 rolls around and they would give anything to have the body they had ten years younger.
We need to make peace with the progression that is our lives. There is no going backward.
On
ly foward. 
