Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. Remember to subscribe to our new YouTube channel for a fireside chat version of our podcast. Simply look us up on YouTube to subscribe or visit LivingHour.org/youtube. Today’s podcast has been edited and adapted from Thoughts Are Things by Prentice Mulford, published in 1898.

THE tendency of many people after they are a little “advanced in years” is to look backward with regret. The “looking” should be the other way–forward. If you want to go backward in every sense (mental and physical), keep on cultivating the mood of living regretfully in your past life.

It is one chief characteristic of the material mind to hold tenaciously to the past. It likes to recall the past and mourn over it. The material mind has a never-ending series of solemn amusement in recalling past joys, and feeling sad because they are never to come again.

But the real self, the spirit, cares relatively little for its past. It courts change. It expects to be a different individual, in thought, a year hence from what it is today. Indeed it is willing a thousand years hence to forget who it is today, for it knows that this intense desire to remember itself for what it has been retards its advance toward greater power and greater pleasure.

Do you want forever to bear with you the memory and burden of pain, especially when such burden brings more pain and deprives you of pleasure? It is like a bird that insists on carrying with it always the shell from which it was hatched. If you have a sad remembrance, fling it off. If you can’t fling it off, demand that the Supreme Power provide aid to help you do so, and such aid will come.

If you want to grow old, feeble, gray, and withered, go at once and live in your past, and regret your youth. Go and to revisit places and houses where you lived twenty, thirty, forty years ago; call back the dead; mourn over them; live in remembrance over the joys you had there, and say they are gone and fled, and will never come again.

In so doing you are fastening dead selves all over you. If we came into this physical life with the memory of our last one, we should come into the world physically as miniature, decrepit, and grizzled old men and women. Youth physically is fresh and blooming, because it packs no past sad material remembrances with it.

A girl is beautiful because her spirit has flung off the past and sad remembrance of its previous life, and has therefore a chance for a period to assert itself. A woman commences to “age” then, when she commences to load up with regrets over a past but twenty years gone.

For the body it uses, your spirit demands: grace, agility of movement, and personal beauty, for it is made in the (quote) “image of God,” and beauty, grace and agility are the characteristics of that infinite mind and life. In that phase of existence we call childhood and youth, the spirit has the chance to assert its desire for beauty and agility, because it has not (as yet) been loaded up with false beliefs and regrets.

The liveliness, sprightliness, and untiring playfulness of the boy or girl of ten or twelve, is due to the gladness of spirit relieved of the burden that is carried in a past existence. That burden was one of thoughts unprofitable to carry. You would physically have the agility you had at fifteen could you fling off the burden of sad remembrances and beliefs of error that you have been loading up with these twenty or thirty years past.

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