“You may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with you”
The above is one of my favorite movie quotes of all time, from the P.T. Anderson flick Magnolia starring Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and about a thousand other people. The movie presents a tableau of characters living in contemporary Los Angeles, all in different stages of dealing with their past. All the main characters are living in the present, completely and totally, which means they’ve each decided either consciously or sub-consciously to suppress their past. Traumatic experiences has put them in the uncomfortable position of pretending they never even had pasts; they’ve changed names, exiled themselves, abandoned their families. As they are slowly forced to confront their pasts, the thin veneer of artifice that sustained them erodes, leaving a tattered shell of a human being exposed for us, the viewers, to observe.
It is not a pretty picture.
The film’s focus on our past lives is something I have never forgotten, which I guess means that Director Anderson achieved what he set out to. I never understood why some people are reticent to discuss their past, or even spend much time thinking about it. Of course I can understand not wanting to dwell on horrible experiences from our past, should we be unlucky enough to have had them. But I’ve never understood the idea of living in the present to such an extent that we prohibit the past from informing our current lives.
For me, the past is something to be constantly mined. Memories shift. Our recollections of certain events can swerve along with our moods, our situations. Also, as we grow older, as we get smarter, or dumber, or wiser, or more insane, as we get more sensitive to life, our past experiences change along with us. Something that used to beguile us begins to unfold. Mysteries from our past unravel before us. Experiences that we remember with fear and anxiety suddenly, on re-examination, can be drained of their negative energy.
Don’t Be Afraid to Look Back
We all know that in order to move forward, we’ve got to have a good hold of what has come before. Of what we were like, of what we were capable of at different times in our life. There is a Winston Churchill quote that I am fond of paraphrasing. I can’t find it anywhere on the web, so please take the attribution with a grain of salt. If someone knows the quote I am about to butcher, please feel free to leave it for me in the comments and I’ll update and attribute the credit.
The saying is that life should get easier as we grow older and mature, because if you’ve been paying attention and learning, you are better equipped to deal with the problems that life presents to us.
It’s not that life doesn’t get more serious as we age and mature. It does get more serious. The decisions I make today, where to live, what risks to take, what career moves to make, what agreements to sign, are much more serious than who I should have taken to my prom, or what college I attended? But at the time those decisions seemed like the biggest of my life, and that in fact, they would be the hardest problems I ever had to solve.
When we make the conscious decision to mine our memories, we will come up with the occasional nuggets. And those little pieces of gold are worth more than their weight. We can hang them on our mental mantle, knowing we’ve done the investigations necessary to make the most out of today and tomorrow.
Image Source: Cavin on Flickr
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”A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.” Not entirely sure if you’re referring to this one since Churchill quotes are plentiful and oh so rich! Um. yeah, Im reading your articles. They are awesome. Just ask YOU.
Awesome post bro. As the saying goes, you have to know where you come from to know where you’re going. And often to you have to get to the end of the story to find your way back to the beginning. ha, the long walk home…
Forgive my segue to another quote of Winston which I find humorous… “I like pigs: cats look down on human beings, dogs look up to them, but pigs just treat us as their equals”.
It’s on a bookend I got through Levengers (with a porker on top of course!). The story goes….Created by the British artist Jon Bickley, this sculpture is based on Sir Winston Churchill’s drawings of pigs….Churchill was especially fond of them, as Pig was the pet name his wife Clementine, gave him.
I was sure you wanted to know that.
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