The Power of a Restart
Hello Courageous Thrivers,
To be fully human and fully alive is to continually re-start.
To truly re-start we cannot ignore painful (or glorious) truths of the past. Nor can we stay in a place of perpetual regret or perpetual punishment. We must genuinely, messily wrestle with all of it to find hope that we can find a way forward, together, and create what we long for.
Recently, I explored the idea of re-starts with my friend and colleague Sara Arey. Several useful reflection questions arose from our conversation:
What does it mean and entail to restart from where you are (not some magical clean slate)?
What healing and releasing is available to us as part of a restart?
How do we determine what aspects of the past bear looking at as part of the movement towards a new start?
What values guide how we process the past and move towards a new start?
What does it mean and entail to restart from where you are (not some magical clean slate)?
A few years ago, I wrote a piece inspired by a phrase my youngest son, Devin, was fond of saying to me (and to himself) at the time, “No biggie. Just re-start.”
It’s been a powerful reminder for me because I have a tendency to get stuck dwelling on past failures and beating myself up indefinitely. I return to it often.
There is power we can harness when life offers us a new start, or when we choose it, primarily because it disrupts old habits that may be getting in the way of our ability to move forward in new ways. Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before, a book about habits, calls this practice the Clean Slate Strategy (though she notes that clean slates can also disrupt “good” habits if we’re not paying attention.)
However, though there are many re-starts available to us as humans—new days, new moons, new seasons, etc.—there is no magical return to a moment before we started in the first place.
We like to think of re-starts as perfectly “clean slates,” but the reality is that when we restart, we always do so from where we are now, as who we are now, both of which are shaped by the past. That is true for us both individually and collectively.
The pain of past losses may be less acute today than when they first happened, but the impact they had remains part of us and can even be passed on to our children and their children.
The good news is that we also bring with us the wisdom gained, skills, and knowledge gathered from our past experiences.
And for those of us who lean towards perfectionism and overthinking waiting for the perfectly clean slate can prevent us from doing what is most necessary when we want to restart, which is to. . . Wait for it... Start.
For entrepreneurs like me, this pattern of not-starting because it’s not yet the perfect time is extremely costly.
That’s why, in addition to regularly harnessing all the power of clean slates that I can—to include making the inconvenient, but somehow energetically significant transition from “thriving4equity” to “thrivingforequity” everywhere, including on Instagram, I also regularly remind myself that the re-start I long for always begins where I am right now.
There’s a loss in letting go of the fantasy of the perfect new beginning, but there’s also incredible freedom to take full advantage of the power of starting anew right now, as I am, where I am. Both/and.
What healing and releasing is available to us as part of a restart?
One of the reasons that clean slate imagery is so powerful is that it offers the promise that our past regrets, mistakes, losses, and pain can somehow be erased. And who doesn’t want that?
The problem is that life doesn’t work that way.
We see this wish powerfully in action collectively in the United States and other places where white people of European descent try to start again without truly reckoning with our collective past, which includes the genocide of people and other living beings by European settlers, forced enslavement of people of African descent, rape and abuse of women, stolen lands, broken treaties, unfair laws, and a constant undermining of the rights of workers in deference to the desires of the ruling class.
And it’s not just white nationalists who want to avoid truly reckoning with our past. It’s a key piece of white liberal “colorblind” ideology, too. We don’t want to look back. We want to move forward and pretend none of this has anything to do with us. The folly of that fantasy is quite clear in 2026. Because while we bring the lessons of the past with us to our new starts, we can’t bring lessons we’ve failed to learn.
I think a big part of the problem for us as a collective and as individuals is that we haven’t made room for the healing and releasing that becomes available when we face hard truths about our shared past, distant and near.
Instead, we’ve built a culture that focuses on blame, shame, and punishment. And no one wants to be on the receiving end of that.
So we avoid. We divert. We pretend. We numb. We get defensive. We get stuck in shame and self-critique. And in doing so, we miss the healing and the new starts that we could find if we were willing to follow the messy path to get there.
I’ve heard a number of people I respect share their view that we should bring back shame.
I get their point. And while I agree with the sentiment that it shouldn’t be socially acceptable to rape women at parties, or to hoard such massive amounts of wealth that it is impossible for one person to use it all. I don’t think shame leads to new starts, at least not often.
More often, it leads instead to a powerful avoidance of seeing where we have been responsible for and/or benefited from harm.
But there is another option. We can decide that we want a restart badly enough that we are willing to do whatever it takes to heal, to release, even when it means (and it will) that we need to learn to forgive.
I am reminded of stories from the Corrymeala Community in Northern Ireland where Catholics and Protestants who had been part of the violent conflicts of The Troubles for years came together and shared their stories, and their heartbreaks, some of which had likely been directly caused by others in that same room. Because after so much suffering, they all wanted a restart.
No one in that room was under the illusion that magical clean slate available. But they wanted a different future. And that desire contained within it an invitation to forgive, to release, and to heal.
There is no skipping over the need for forgiveness of self and others that is required to get us to the place of a true restart. The process isn’t easy or straightforward.
But what becomes possible when we get curious, collectively and personally, about what is available to us when we face the truth, feel the pain, and move through it so we can release the past and heal?
I, for one, want to find out.
How do we determine what aspects of the past bear looking at as part of the movement towards a new start?
Guideline #1: Who’s hurting?
This question has come up a lot in my marriage lately because, unlike me, my husband is generally optimistic and inclined to focus only on looking forward. Until recently, thanks to some help from our amazing relationship coach, Marina Nabão | Somatics Healing & Embodiment, he didn’t see the point of talking about past hurts (or relational “ruptures” as Marina calls them).
The problem with his approach is that ignoring the rupture doesn’t make them go away. I was still carrying the pain around. It was repressed, but not released. Not healed. And neither of us had gotten the benefit of actually being vulnerable and working through it. In these cases, not looking into the past was getting in the way of us having the kind of loving, intimate relationship that we both want in the present.
As we have navigated the question of what parts of the past we need to work through and which ones don’t need revisiting, one of the criteria we use is that we err on the side of the perspective of the person who is bringing up the area of wounding/harm/rupture. They are the one who gets to say, “This is something that needs attention,” even if the other person thinks they should “just get over it”
I think that principle holds true for collective pain as well. A good guide to follow is that the group that is saying they are suffering and in pain from things that happened in the past gets the benefit of the doubt that the harm hasn’t been repaired. Whatever they are asking you/us to look at is an aspect of the past that we need to face.
The caveat I would add here is that in practice, this principle only works if there is a shared goal of healing, of repair. If the person harmed only wants revenge, or to cause the perpetrator pain, then there isn’t room yet for a re-start. It’s a very human and understandable feeling to have when harm has been caused, but it’s not going to work as a basis for a shared re-start.
In my experience, however, this is rarely the case when historically marginalized people (poor people, People of Color, women, people with disabilities, gender non-conforming people, etc.) say that harm has not been repaired. They often get heard as saying “We want you to suffer like we do,” but usually, if we listen well, we will see that the goal isn’t for another group to suffer, but for all of us to thrive together.
In this case, looking at the past, and finding ways to seek and offer repair, is a necessary part of the process of finding our shared solution.
A second guideline is that it’s important to look at repetitive patterns, even if one incident seems like it’s not a big deal.
This is where discussions of what are called microaggressions become particularly relevant on the collective level. And it can be hard to work with because when they happen they are almost always unintentional and unseen on the part of the perpetrator, but for the person on the receiving end, it’s “death by 1000 lashes” - and you may have just delivered last 999.
I’ll tell on myself for this one. I used to regularly ask the question, “But where are you REALLY from?” when I met someone who had an accent that indicated that they weren’t a native “American English” speaker and whose physical appearance in some way indicated to me that they may have been born in another country, but who answered the initial “Where are you from question with the name of a town or city in the U.S. I thought I was being caring, wanting to REALLY know them, wanting to honor their heritage. What I didn’t recognize was 1) They already told me as much as they wanted me to know in their first answer and I wasn’t respecting that, and 2) This was a response they got over and over again from white Americans like me.
In this case there is a group pattern. It’s not specific to me as an individual, but the pattern that has developed over time indicates that looking at the past is part of how we will find a solution.
What values guide how we process the past and move towards a new start?
The answer to this question will vary, but what’s important is that we make the values behind the restart process visible to ourselves and others. That way, if there are conflicts at the value level we can work with them. And if we find shared values, we can open up new possibilities together for ways forward.
Here’s an example of a couple of my values and how they guide my processing of the past.
I value mercy, grace and forgiveness. I value respect for all human beings no matter how perfect. I value love over judgement.
So when I start down the path of self-condemnation, ruminating on past failures, errors, harm I’ve caused, I am feeding the part of me that somehow feels more comfortable being punished than feeling worthy and loved. In this case, I’m out of alignment with my values in the way that I’m looking at and processing the past. And most of the time I find that looking at the past from this perspective weighs me down rather than helping me to move forward. Because in it there is no restart, just eternal, repeating cycles of punishment.
I may be looking at aspects of my past behavior that I need to look at and learn from, but I’m not being guided by my values.
When I get stuck in this place it often helps me to think of people who have to start life again after time in prison. Given how messed up our justice system is, many times they were there due more to injustice than to justice. But sometimes they have made some terrible mistakes that have caused incredible harm. I can fairly easily call on compassion for them. I don’t want anyone to live their life in a place of never-ending punishment, no matter what they did.
Humans make mistakes. Sometimes small mistakes that have terrible consequences, sometimes big mistakes that by some stroke of luck, end up causing very little damage. Accountability is essential. Repair and restoration need to happen, but those are very different processes.
When I remember my strong belief in the need for grace and mercy as foundations for justice and liberation for all of us, I can notice how hypocritical it is for me not to be willing to offer forgiveness, and a re-start, to myself, imperfect as I am.
Again, this finding of values on which to build a re-start process applies collectively as well. And it starts with unearthing the values that each group or individual has, and seeing where we might find a shared value to guide the process.
Finding shared values is a key aspect of the process I learned in my Racial Justice from the Heart Facilitator training with Aminata Desert Rose Plant Walker Fire Woman (aka Dr. Amanda Kemp). It’s not easy, but it’s incredibly powerful when you’re seeking a restart (or just a start) around an emotionally charged issue such as racism. It requires starting with listening for understanding, rather than seeking to argue or make your point heard. The surprising thing is that often it leads to the discovery of a shared value between two people or groups that look, on the surface not to have any.
It’s not an easy process, but I’ve seen it create the ground for a powerful restart!
Related Readings:
No Biggie. Just Restart
Other Resources:
📖 Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin
📖 How to Read a Book by Monica Woods novel about a woman re-starting life in Portland, Maine after prison
📖 Just Mercy, book by Bryan Stevenson about his experiences working with people on death row
🔗 Why September Is the Other January, & How to Take Advantage of This Clean Slate | Gretchen Rubin
🔗 @christabelmintahnwankwo on Instagram. A queer woman living in Ghana offers powerful challenges and teaches essential relational skill for these times.
🔗 Free masterclass on how to transform your conversations about racism with Dr. Amanda Kemp.
🔗 Organization provides opportunities for discussions across difference in the U.S. Braver Angels
