We Americans seem a bit fixated on new things, probably because we have, relatively, little history. There is nothing wrong with looking forward to tomorrow, tomorrow is where our children will be born, our businesses will grow, and where our nation will prosper. There is no problem looking forward tomorrow as long as you don’t forget how to live in the present and learn from the past. All too often we want to live for the now, shrugging off the problems of the past, and leaving the problems of tomorrow until we get there. Not to mention living in the past. We can’t abandon any for the one, we have to be conscience of all three to thrive today and build for a tomorrow, based upon the lessons and traditions of the past.
A true democracy will take into account the traditions of a people when it seeks to govern those people. You can’t, for example, rule Catholics and tell them that they must provide contraception for employees, when the Church has taught against the use of contraception since it became feasible. Ignoring the traditions of a people has proven problematic for many governments, it is a lesson that America is learning in the middle east, it is a lesson we should have learned when we dealt with the native tribes here in America. The old maxim says, if you fail to learn from history, then you are doomed to repeat it. For a democracy to flourish, it must recognize its traditions and the history surrounding those traditions.
Another way to look at it is to see the living history in our daily lives. It was a common practice for young people to seek the council of previous generations when they sought to make a decision of any import. They leant on the experience of those who had lived longer than they had to guide their decisions so that they could make the best one. Today it is far too common to see those same elders that our generation should be seeking out being abandoned in “retirement centers” or “villages.” We have ignored our responsibility as children to care for our parents when they grow up. If we throw away this experience we will never get it back, how do we govern if we never learn from those who have governed.
Just as we should make account of what has gone before, so to, we must look where we are going. Anyone who has ever tried to navigate over an open space where the horizons are flat, it can be hard to keep a true bearing. Not being able to see where you are going, not to have a landmark by which to head we will inevitably loose our way. The easiest landmark to guide ourselves is our own blood. Just as we are guided by traditions our those who came before, we should be guided by the needs of those who have yet to be born. It is, after all, them who will pay for our mistakes and reap the rewards of our successes.
When we place the well-being of our children at the center of our worldview, and aim to make the world a better place for them, we will loose the bad habits of the past and shed the self-centeredness our culture currently promotes. We can’t, honestly, continue spending like there is no tomorrow, if we are planning to leave anything for future generations. As the saying goes, you can’t plan for a tomorrow if it’s not there. The selfishness of our current generation and the ones immediately before that taught us to be this way, seek to ruin the world for our pleasure, and immediate gratification. If we want to learn from the mistakes of the past, and plan for a better future, we have to stop ignoring that there will be one.
What does it really mean to live in the moment? Can we as a society really live in the now and not heed the past and anticipate the future? I would say that a healthy society does heed the past to plan for the future, while recognizing the needs and desires of the now. We shouldn’t live lives of insufficiency because it could put the future in jeopardy, but there is no need to live to any great excess. Any person who seeks to live healthy must find a balance between nutrition and taste, and so we as a society, seeking to live healthy, must find the balance between the past and the future. The natural balance between the two is the present. By seeking that balance, we find a place to live in the present.
We can find that balance by embracing the traditions passed to us by those who came before and teaching them to our children. By learning from the mistakes of the past so that, by our example, our children learn to do better than we ourselves. By looking forward and preparing the world for our children that they deserve because they are our children, we fulfill the hopes and dreams of our parents. It’s not to far fetched to say grandparents love watching their grand-babies growing up and succeeding, the mind-blowing bit, comes when you realize that you are someone’s grand-baby as are your parents. We are all someone’s grand-baby we are the future they prepared for, and we will be the past our children look to. This is what it means to live in the here and now, to be tied inexorably to the past and the future without being stuck in either one.
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