The past is a complex question that we often refer to philosophers. What is the past, really. Certainly the older we grow, the longer our personal past becomes. At some point our past becomes longer than our expected future. Over a lifetime we may try to hide it, forget it, remember all of it, or live with it. No matter how we orient to our past we find that it is just that---past. Maybe for that reason it can sometimes seem inessential to our present or frustratingly inalterable. At other times, it may be nostalgically dear or appear hard to integrate and curiously elusive.
Usually the past travels with us like a shadow only seen when our life is reflected in a certain light. However, during times of transition we sometimes find a need to sort through it. I'm doing that right now. Maybe you're doing that too. Other people in my life are also engaged in this process. An artist friend thirty years older than I am, nearing the end of her life, is sorting through a lifetime of art work. She's deciding what to do with it as she contemplates her creative past and whether it holds any enduring meaning. On the other hand, I have a friend who is transitioning from a science background to an artist's life. She's sorting through personal and material past trying to free her creativity and find her style. Yet another friend is settling the estate of her parent. While she sorts through her father's things and her memory of him she considers her past and it's role in the present. I'm sorting through my past, materially and mentally, in order to downsize and prepare for a move back to my hometown to be a family caregiver. Each of us are being prompted, by our phase of life, to release or reinterpret things representing the past in order to move forward. I guess. Is that what we're doing?
I turned to great thinkers for more insight. George Orwell wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Though he was probably talking about power in our society, Orwell's observations also apply to how the past works in our personal lives. The events and material from our past often do control the future we experience---for better or for ill. And who we are at present does determine how we narrate our past. By Orwell's logic I suppose it follows, for some, that sorting through the past gives a sense of order or control over it and thus, more space and freedom to move forward into a new future. I hope so.
Pasts follow us through life. Though they lie only a moment away in our minds, some of us will never look back. I believe the past holds keys that, at certain times in our lives, open doors to new understanding and which reveal new paths. Our past is a lifelong referential point we glimpse through our children, our photographs, or our hearts which can propel growth and transformation thereby laying groundwork for the challenge of our future.
Update May 2013, In Chaim Potak's, Davita's Harp, he writes, "…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.”
