Spiritually speaking, the cost of starting over is not what we pay to achieve some desire of ours, but is in our willingness to let go of — to dare to live without — any desire we may have whose promise of fulfillment drives us to search for it in another tomorrow. The fresh start of a New Life appears only as our “old” life disappears — only as we willingly “die” to whom we have been.

There are any number of ways to state this timeless truth, but the action required remains unchanged: If we wish to start our lives over new, the spiritual price (of admission) is that we agree to no longer carry over our thoughts about ourselves from moment to moment.

To this end, and to help us do what is needed to free ourselves, we must see that while our habit of revisiting and then reliving past mental and emotional states may lend us welcome and familiar sensations, this same “loan” costs us our chance to know the Now, to be New.

We must dare to step out of our past — and into the Now — every time we can catch ourselves about to be carried off by some common self-consideration. This means we watch, catch, and then drop our thoughts as they appear within our awareness, instead of picking each one up and holding it to our ear like a seashell in the hopes of catching the sweet sound of (our) self again.