I reckon we often think about time as a line. We stand at a point on the line and we call that point the present. Everything from the start of the line up to that point is the past. It’s behind us. And everything from that point to the end of the line is the future. It’s ahead of us. In fact, I’ve used just this idea many times in the consulting room.
It’s neat.
But it’s not a good model of reality!
Time in many ways is a more cumulative process. We grow, not by leaving the past behind us. Every moment emerges from the accumulated past. The past is always within us, always present. It’s probably more like the rings of a tree. Each day grows out of all the other days.
Henri Bergson puts it this way, in his “Creative Evolution”
……the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, 1 is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer ; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation……..the past is preserved by itself, automatically……The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared—in short, only that which can give useful work.
He is saying that we select elements of the past (memories) which might be useful to us in the present. He’s describing something ideal there, explaining something about the mind, but it is really more complex than that, isn’t it? Quite often, it seems, some memory is evoked seemingly against our will, and without it being at all clear that its becoming conscious in a helpful way. But in those moments, in those experiences, we have the opportunities to learn a lot about ourselves.
To what extent do we operate on a kind autopilot ( a major theme of this heroes not zombies site ), with the past memories, habits, loops, paths, somehow running our whole lives?
Not that we can act without these influences. Here’s Bergson again…
it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act
Just to put this in context, when he refers to our entire past, he includes what we brought into this world when we were born, not just our accumulated experiences of this life. One common fascinating aspect of that view is our common experience of behaviours and traits which we see in our children or ourselves which seem identical to those of certain predecessors….a father, grandmother, great grandparent, or some other relative who was never alive at the same time as this child.
We don’t have to operate only on autopilot of course. We can develop our understanding of ourselves, become more aware of our present moment, of our choices and why we are making them, and create some small spaces (the neuroscientist’s “necessary distance”) between what comes up and what we do……we can learn to respond rather than react, and in so doing grasp that opportunity to become the active author of our own story.
To become heroes, not zombies.
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Heroes Not Zombies 