The Past

When I decided to start a new blog in WordPress, I was determined to leave my old blog alone. You know, new publisher, start afresh, the whole nine yards. I even thought of starting new topics straightaway.

Yeeah, never happened. I ended up moving all of my old writings to this blog, and haven’t written anything else ever since. Well, until now. And I haven’t told anyone else about my new blog, so I doubt there’s anyone out there who reads my blog, except for my brother and his friend (whose blogs are both exceptional). I don’t really mind though, since I write for the sake of writing itself, and conventional diaries are so, well, conventional. But of course it’d be great to have people occasionally read my blog. After all, that is the reason it is being published, innit?

Anyways, the concept of starting fresh has never really been my forte. Though it is not something that’s easy to do in the first place. I have stumbled upon reasons through out my life to do so: moved to a different city, a different country, breaking up with exes. But somehow my past always haunts me. Well, maybe ‘haunt’ is not the right word. See, I have a tendency to cling to the past. Not so much now, as I have learned to change. I often wonder what makes ‘the past’ so enticing. Perhaps because ‘the past’ seems like a whole different dimension I no longer live in. It has passed, therefore it is neither challenging (like the present), nor it is intimidating (like the future). It is simply missed. Hence the term: the good ol’ days.

I recall an interesting paper called The Unreality of Time (Author’s Introduction) written by J.M.E McTaggart that analyzes the flow of time. As opposed to popular perception of time moving forward -from past, to present, to the future-, McTaggart argued that events seem to be ordered in time and that time’s passage can be understood in terms of events moving from the future to the present to the past, and that time was not a real thing in the physical world. If we assumed everything began with nothingness, an event naturally began by being a future event, after each moment it became a nearer future, moments later it became the present, and respectively, the past. Finally, once an event became the past, it will remain there forever. Oh how I wish that was true. In my romantic/melancholic world, a metaphysic theory seems so absurd.

I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse my tendency to digress :) Anyways, let’s just assume my life is a journey, and I -as the traveler- have been going from one destination to another ever since I was born. Since I was not born yesterday, I came to this moment bringing baggages. Baggages inundated with things I did not let go, things I wanted to let go but wasn’t able to, things too good to leave behind, things too bad to forget, things I’ve picked up along the way, things that might be useful for my future journey. I have to remember though, that without those baggages, I travel light, but my journey might turn out to be less interesting. Ultimately, I am the one who decides what to or not to bring. So, come to think of it, perhaps holding on to the past is not all bad after all.