It is impossible to move backwards in your life, because you are always looking at everything with a new mind.

Ever wonder how blood flows? Ever wonder how it can constantly flow in just one direction? Think about it. There are a bunch of tubes call arteries and veins and one big squeezy pump in the middle called a heart. All the heart knows is to contract its muscle and squeeze the blood out. How does the blood move out in only one direction? Valves!

There is a valve on the backside of each ventricle in your heart that keeps the blood from flowing out backwards into your veins. There is a valve on the front side of each ventricle that keeps blood from flowing back into the ventricle when it is relaxing and refilling. These are simple pressure valves, and they last a lifetime. Brilliant, eh?

There are also valves all along your venous system in your arms and legs. The veins in your body are the low-pressure pipes that return all the blood to your heart so that it can be pumped through your lungs to pick up more oxygen and pumped again through you’re your arteries to your entire body. As the blood makes its way back toward your heart, it passes valves. Once it passes each valve, it is prevented from moving backwards past that point.

You can actually see some of them in your arms and hands. There are little lumps that look like little bulbs along the veins. You can actually squeeze the blood backwards in the veins, and you can see that the blood that has already passed the valve does not flow backwards into the now empty vein. Brilliant again, eh?

Well I believe that it works the same with your thinking, and with your life. You can never actually go backwards. Sometimes it feels like we are repeating lessons, and moving backwards in relationships, in our career, with our checkbook balance, and with our thoughts. But it is never the same. Our experience is always slightly different, and the angle we look at all these things is slightly changed.

Everything is constantly changing.  Plants are growing. Babies are being born. Humanity as a whole is learning. Computers are processing data ever faster. The Internet is filled with more and more information. Even the cells in your body are constantly regenerating. We can never actually look an issue in our life with the same mind that we looked at it yesterday, because it is constantly growing, evolving, replacing cells, and assimilating all our new thoughts about everything else.

Once you discover something, you can never think the same way again. Once you discover a shortcut on the road, a new way to fold a shirt, what salt does to the taste of eggs, or the amazing combination of peanut butter and chocolate, you can never go backwards to not knowing it. Every day we are learning new things, and that impacts how we look at everything else.

So be encouraged. If you are ever feeling you are going backwards, you aren’t. You can’t. You are constantly looking at everything with a new mind, and that opens the possibility of each moment offering a chance to solve an old issue, each moment offering the possibility of an epiphany.

Embrace it, engulf it, dive right into each moment and feel the optimism of always having a brand new chance.