The Buddha discovered that your actions right now are not totally determined by the past. You do have the freedom to choose. So why not choose to do something skillful right now? And right now, and right now. Keep at it.

"There’s another thing that [the Buddha] recommends that you not think about in his discussion on appropriate attention in Majjhima 2. He talks about questions that are not worth following, not worth paying attention to. And some of them are, “What was I in the past? Was I in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? How will I be in the future? What will I be in the future?” Some people say, “Well, didn’t the Buddha ask these questions of himself when he first gained awakening?” The answer is that perhaps that was his first motivation to gain those first two knowledges. But then those are precisely the questions he dropped, because he realized that the question of who he was, was not a useful question — because, after all, the whole process was driven by action.

He asked himself: Why not look directly at actions? Actions that are skillful, actions that are unskillful — in ways that you can get past those categories of skillful and unskillful — in other words, to get to the kind of kamma that leads to the end of kamma. You do that not by thinking about who you were or who was guilty or who was innocent or who was good or who was bad, but simply by looking at actions: good actions, bad actions, skillful actions, unskillful, informed by right view, informed by wrong view. That takes the people out of the equation. It leaves the actions.

Then with regard to action, remember the Buddha discovered that your actions right now are not totally determined by the past. You do have the freedom to choose. So why not choose to do something skillful right now? And right now, and right now. Keep at it. That’s what the Buddha did, and in doing so he was showing by example that you should put aside questions of your identity — who you were, who you are, who you might be — and focus just on the question of actions. What are the actions that were done in the past that are yielding their results right now? If it’s a result you don’t like, knowing the general principle of action, what could you change?"

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Buddha’s Narratives & Yours"

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