"When all things seem to fail, stand on your inner strength, shovel today's challenges for your tomorrow's freedom." 

Most of us had been there, at the end of numerous screw-ups, failures, and heartbreaks, feeling numbed and stagnated wishing for a divine intervention to make everything go away. There is no direction to the course of life as you are exhausted by the weight of the emotional baggage and despair. You wish to go back in time and start over again. Like a computer game, we all wished at some point, to go back to the 'last saved checkpoint' and start over fixing the mistakes we made previously. 

Going back in time is impossible and our lives may be sort of computer games as per Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk, but it is certainly one without restarts and reloads. What we can do, use the wisdom gained from failures and start over. What is important is to "forget what we became, what matters is what we've become, and our potentials to overcome." Here are 5 steps to help you start over in life: 

1.Forgive yourself and let go of the past

“The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.” - Shannon L. Alder
Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for whatever horrendous mistake or screw-up you made. Forgive yourself for the opportunities you squandered, misjudgements you made and time wasted. Because, you are not well-written error- free program, but a human with plenty of bugs and errors. Being a human and having free will also mean having the choice to make mistakes and learn from them.

A simple exercise to forgive yourself is to sit down with a notebook and pen, then write down your grave mistakes and say that you have forgiven yourself.

The next part is to forgive others, who may be directly or indirectly caused your troubles. Holding on to the past and keeping grudges will only trap you in the past. Most cases you will be going through something called Sunk Cost fallacy, by clinging to the past. Look forward and leave the past behind.

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