“What is your recovery rate? How long does it take you to recover from actions and behaviors that upset you? Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks?”

This is what I once read in an article written by Graham Harris, an eminent ecologist. Needless to say, such strong emotional questions soon grasped my attention.

As for recovery, everyone knows how important it is for our physical health. However, not so many people are aware how significant recovery is for our mental health.

For instance, we are aware that we need to exercise to keep the body fit, and accept that a reasonable measure of health is the speed at which our heart and respiratory system recovers after exercise.

On the other hand, however, when we feel a negative emotion, it’s more likely that we’ll just continue being immersed in that negativity without being able to clear our head or proceed with our tasks. Yet, learning to look forward and recover from setbacks is essential.

To some extent, the advantage of the ability to survive a emotional disaster even outweighs that of the capability to recover from a physical disease. Whether we can get over a serious disease does not completely depend on us, while whether we can recover from mental setback is totally up to us. Clear-cut examples are Helen Keller and Steven Hawking, among others.

Tomorrow is another day. Thus, it’s necessary for us to focus on today rather than yesterday. Although we should never totally forget the past, we shouldn’t be totally overwhelmed by the past, especially the negative feelings of the past. And the most important thing in our life is to try our best to recover from the past and do well now so that we can ensure a brighter future.

In the end, I’d like to share a sentence with you: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift — that is why we call it “present.”