Past And Future

I had a professor who delighted in using such complex language it frequently left me confused. Fortunately, I had a friend who was blessed with remarkable intellect. After class I would ask Gary, “What was he saying?” Gary would then explain, in simple terms, what had been said. I’ve always admired folks who could take complex or confusing concepts and explain them so clearly even I could grasp the meaning.

Many philosophers and theologians suffer, either from ego or overwhelming intellect, from an inability to speak clearly. One who was blessed with a clear way of expressing himself, was Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian and philosopher. He is widely considered the first Christian existentialist philosopher.

Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Even when life seems absurd and incomprehensible we seek to live responsible lives and be authentically ourselves rather than simply drifting along according to the demands of society.

By the time we’ve got a few years on us we’ve all traveled down at least a few miles of unimproved road. What is difficult is to live forwards when those difficult miles keep tugging us backwards. Sometimes it seems as if memory is our enemy. We know the past is past but it tends to creep into our present and spoil our future. It is actually an act of courage to live forwards and not allow our past to corrupt our present.

Life is dynamic, it flows forward and those who cling to the past will inevitably be worn down by the onrushing stream. That does not mean we don’t look to history to understand the potential paths the future might take.

Life is tricky that way. We frequently want to leave the past behind and not let it influence the future but sometimes our memories so vividly illuminate the present that they cannot be simply dismissed.

Seems to me, the goal is to achieve sufficient balance so we neither live in the past or else fail to learn and so repeat the same mistakes over and over. There are spiritual teachers who advocate for an attitude that is so non-judgmental it would make it very difficult to live in the real world. To be utterly non-judgmental would be like having no screens on our windows so the mosquitoes in life would regularly feast on us.

If we would be appropriately judgmental we need to focus the flame of our attention on our thoughts and motivations.

We live in a world in which we are constantly pressured to believe and behave in certain ways. The antidote to such programming is to be aware of why we think the way we do. Awareness, on a deep level, gives us freedom. We don’t forget the past but we also don’t cling to it either.

Thinking on such a non-superficial level is difficult, it requires sometimes discarding things which, when we truly examine them, are an insult to who we really are.