“One may return to the place of his birth, but he cannot return to his youth.” –John Burroughs
Life’s journey is a one-way trip that always goes forward, whether we want it to or not. We can take mental journeys to the past, but we cannot physically travel back in time, and most of us who mentally revisit our past are very selective about which parts we wish to visit. For most people, the past is not better than the present or the future. It only seems that way because we focus on the positive aspects of the past and forget about the negative parts.
American poet and historian Carl Sandburg gave this advice about living in the present: “The past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, nor just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post-mortems. And remember, no one can get the jump on the future.”
The happiest people are those who live in the present, look forward to the future and seldom look back. The past is over and done with, and there is nothing about the past that we can change. If we have pleasant memories, we can derive some pleasure from mentally reliving them, but there is nothing we can do about any regrets we have. What we did, we did, and what happened, happened, no matter how painful it is for us.
We can’t change the past, but we can bury it. That is exactly what a minister friend of mine did. The pain of the past was diminishing the quality of his present life, so he decided that the past must be buried. It is not easy to bury a painful past, and it is not possible to completely put it behind us. Memories and emotions from the past will sometimes be triggered by things that happen to us in the present, and we will experience some temporary pain. But we don’t have to let this pain dwell indefinitely or get us down. We can focus on the present and push those bad memories to the back recesses of our mind.
If our present life is reasonably good, it is senseless to diminish the quality of it because of things that happened in the past. We need to put on a good set of blinders and look mostly to the future. If you have never done so before, try turning your head and looking backward as you walk down a sidewalk. If you are lucky enough to avoid falling down on the hard concrete, at the very least your neck will hurt, and you will be embarrassed if anyone sees what you are doing. It is just as important to look forward as we journey through life as it is to look forward when we take a walk.
Think about it.
***
Copyright 2024
Allen W. Smith
