As humans we build and surround ourselves with monuments of the past, both in stone and in the ritualistic honoring of events that we see as having shaped our society in such a way that they deserve to be memorialized. A nostalgic grip upon a past none of us have touched in the flesh.
We like to honor leaders and soldiers, some who fought in wars that took place hundreds of years ago. We honor their sacrifice to a cause we only have tangential connections too.
In a way it is this perverse obsession with the past, surrounded by the images, words, and codes of time passed, that can blind us and inhibit our effort to focus on the future, and most importantly: the now. Yet the past can also help us from making the same mistakes over and over, or so they say. If you study history you know that saying is a complete joke, because over the eons one of the things humans have done consistently is make the same mistakes repeatedly.
That doesn’t mean our past is filled with failure, by any means, the human species is quite remarkable and we have built some pretty incredible things, from breathtaking architecture, to the humble microprocessor which is allowing our current form of communication: the web blog.
While we fixate on the past, we can easily forget the tens of thousands who are yet to be born. We neglect aspects of our world, sometimes because of the way we have bound ourselves to our old ways. The environment suffers along with the way we care for people– that being healthcare and financial security. Many would ask: “Have we lost our way?”
A good portion of them would also say that our ‘way’ ends in disaster. Our past cannot save us from our eventual end, which could come a million different ways; dealer’s choice. And yet, my dear reader, you may not have guessed that I am, in fact, not so pessimistic.
We should not seek any shelter in the past, we should live for today and help others so they may do the same. The future, after all, is what we make it. So let’s make it excellent.