When I was in senior high school, one of my teachers once said, “Look back on the past and look forward to the future”. Although she was exemplifying the sentence referring to the phrase “look forward to”, she was saying those words that had influenced me for so long.

However, a saying goes, “It is easy to be negative about past mistakes and unhappiness. But it is much more healing to look at ourselves and our past in the light of experience, acceptance and growth.” No matter how lucky or unlucky your past was, change your thinking from the negative one to the positive one, appreciate it, learn from it and look forward to the future.

I reached the low of my study in the second semester, failing to pass the physics final exam. Ridiculously enough, at first, I fully believed what others said, “That’s not the end of the world! On contrast, it would surely enrich your collage life.” But, beyond my expectation, it turned out that almost everything got hard-pressed and even impossible because of the silly failure. I lost the chance to apply for the scholarship. Besides, I had no qualifications for getting the school roll student which was regarded as an important part of standing out. Worse still, my counselor told me I wouldn’t be chosen as a key person to be trained by the institute simply because I failed one exam. Inevitably, I was eventually vanquished by the negative emotions, immerging myself in a pessimistic world, which prevented me from moving ahead on the road of study.

Our past is a series of lessons that advance us to higher level of living and love. With the passage of time, I acquire adequate self-knowledge from that silly failure. The formula that the gain is equal to the pain is one-sided and it sometimes makes no sense. Not everything you’re doing or have done can get something in return. And the past failure sheds some light on the study habits or methods with which there is something wrong. Fortunately, mistakes can always easily capture people’s attention and stimulate their imagination, warning people to take some measures to refine and extend methods or choose to adjust themselves to the changing circumstance. For example, Thomas Wolf, an American novelist, had his first novel Look Homeward, Angel rejected 39 times before it was finally published. It’s his past failures that earned him a lot.

It is our past that gives us access to accumulate experience, learn to accept and have benefit of reality, which enables us brave enough to love, strong enough to forgive, generous enough to rejoice in another’s happiness and wise enough to know there is enough love to go around, thus, increases our chances of success and paves the way for us to enjoy a bright future.