Your life didn’t come out of nowhere.

To understand our present, we’ve got to reflect on our past.

It’s already the middle of April.

I said to someone a few days ago that days or weeks sometimes feel slow but years seem to move so damn fast. This is just my perception, of course, but I’m sure just about everyone has felt this way.

I’m coming up on a 2 year anniversary of being in one of the most dreary, vitamin-d deficient places I can imagine exist. And while it’s home and I needed it more than anything, it’s put me in a peculiar place of reflecting on that time.

Someone on some podcast I listened to about a year ago (so honestly I’m hopeless for finding it) talked about how we are the sum of our past 2 or 3 years.

And at first I thought to myself, don’t our entire lives inform who we are? I think that’s true, but I also don’t think that’s what they were saying.

It’s more of a comment on the accumulation of time. How the things we put our time and effort into will sort of stockpile and result in the people who we are right now.

This is a really powerful lesson.

Take a look at these brain scans that picked up Alzheimer disease 20 years before any symptoms were shown. That’s an extremely long time.

If you’re familiar with Epigenetics, you know that we are a major driver of our own health. The poor habits, diets and behaviors we participate in for years on end will have a profound impact on our gene expression.

That’s about as far into the science as I’ll get, but whether it’s health or success or our career’s, there’s a clear trend. You truly get out of life what you give to it.

A lot of the time we don’t see results in a week and quit.

But when we can see our past and how it has shaped us, we can begin to make lasting changes for the future. I see my own personal growth journey I began a year ago change and blossom.

It’s the result of showing up every day (or well, most days) and re-committing to my goals. It’s the result of knowing things aren’t going to pay off right way and doing them anyway. It’s the result of hard work.

But mostly, it’s just being aware.