The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

When you frame the past negatively, your goals become reactive to and based on your past.

So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.

I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

Our past is but a former now, our future a potential one.

Don't live in the past, and don't carry the past around like a burden. But simply use your past as one of your mentors to help refine mistakes and make changes you can invest now and the future.

Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.

The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself. As the psychologist Dr. Brent Slife states in the book Time and Psychological Explanation (emphasis mine): “We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. . . . Our memories are not stored and objective entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

When pondering how the past affected us, we rarely look for OUR effect on it. We think about what we were up against versus what we stood for. We remember what we feared but not what we dreamed. We ponder how much we were loved versus how much we loved. We think, why did all that happen to me? What did I get out of it? Where will it lead me? When perhaps we should wonder, what did I make happen? What did I give? Where will I direct myself now?