No Spilt Milk -- What's With the Name?  by Phoebe Fox

You may have noticed the title of this series is "No Spilt Milk."  Did you wonder what that might mean, in light of our goal of taking a journey together through a year of personal growth? 

I borrowed the phrase from my Grammee, who grew up on a farm and therefore had lots of practical observations based upon farm experiences, nature, and the weather to guide one through life.  I plan to

 share them with you along the way, starting with this one. 

When I was a little girl and something I had my heart set on didn't work out like I thought it should, I sometimes went to Grammee to talk it out.  Grammee would listen patiently, and when I was finished she would look me squarely in the eye and say, "No spilt milk."  The first time she did it, I asked her what that meant.  She explained that when you work on a farm there are a lot of things that can get in the way of things working out exactly as you would like them to.  Animals can balk or get startled, the weather can be tricky or unpredictable, things can trip you up if you're not looking -- especially yourself.  Have you ever started out to do something only to get stopped in your tracks by yourself?  Something you did, or forgot to do, or did not adequately prepare for has reared its ugly head just as you were trying to make headway, and then WHAM.  Your progress gets halted, but good. 

Grammee said there was no point in wasting any of your energy looking backward when something like that happened.  "It would be the same as crying over spilt milk," she said.  "What good would that do?  The milk is already spilt, whether you did it, or the cow tipped the bucket, or you dropped the bucket on your way back to the house.  However it happened, once it is spilt that milk is gone regardless of how it happened.  So what can you gain from worrying about exactly HOW it happened or what led up to it happening or what contributed to it?  That milk has already sunk into the ground and there is no getting it back no matter what you do.  You just have to consider it gone, and go on from there."

Grammee was so right.  There is no going backward in time for us.  Whatever has already happened is done now, and the best we can do is to take what lesson we can from it and move on.  Move forward, focus forward, set our sights ahead and not behind us. 

Most people recall that in Margaret Mitchell's civil war story, "Gone With the Wind ", her character Scarlett O'Hara is fond of saying, "I won't think about that now.  I'll think about that tomorrow.  Tomorrow is another day."  While this is a good way of not letting the weight of a particular moment or setback stop your progress, Scarlett also says something very wise about not wasting energy by looking backward.  At one point in the story, she tries to comfort Ashley Wilkes (her friend and the object of a rather obsessive crush) by cautioning him about mourning the past.  "Don't look back, Ashley," she tells him.  "Never look back.  The past will pull and pull at your heart until there is nothing you can do but look back." 

Wise words indeed.  So let's make a pact that, starting May 1st, we won't look back either.  We will set our sights forward on the goals we want to reach.  The past doesn't matter to the setting of these goals.  It doesn't even matter if you have set this goal for yourself before and have yet to reach it.  What matters is that we are going to move forward with our focus ahead of us on our picture of success, and not behind us on whatever our past has been or what we have been in that past.

We choose every day the kind of person we will be for this day, and those choices are made each moment as the day goes on.  So let's agree on the "No Spilt Milk" policy, and if I catch myself doing it while writing an article for this series I promise not to edit it out.  Instead, I will point it out and we can have a No Spilt Milk moment together.  Every behavior takes a number of repetitions to become a habit or a way of life.  We succeed in our future not by ignoring our past, but by restoring it to its rightful place -- behind us.  It does not determine who we are now because we choose who we are by how we respond every day, in every way, in every situation that life presents to us. 

Let's begin today.