DEALING WITH THE PAST

 

          DEALING WITH THE PAST

It is worthwhile to read history for enlightenment. It has many lessons to teach. It is a story of  battles and wars, discoveries and inventions, rise and fall of civilizations, lives of great men, styles of living and so many other facts.

Reading history is both pleasant and unpleasant because there were all sorts of kings and queens, rulers and their subjects.

History is also a tale of freedom and slavery, dictatorship and democracy, imperialism and aristocracy.

Histories are both long and short. If there is a history of the world, there are many which deal with small territories, towns, villages, even streets and bazaars.

The characters in history have made both good and bad contributions. They have been constructive as also destructive.

To spend a lot of time in reading history is undesirable. Your main concern should be with the present, not the past.

To read occasionally the sacred books like the Bible, the Holy Quran, the Gita and other ancient scriptures which deal with eternal matters of life and death is not wastage of time.

The Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881} said: True past departs not; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless changes.

To refer to the past without altering its contents is always necessary.  Unfortunately, quite a few people either distort history or use it as a tool to serve their selfish ends.

The ideal view about the past is that nothing but good should be talked about the dead.

The English poet-playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616)  believed : What’s gone and past help, should be past grief.

  The best approach in life is neither to cling to the past, nor to dream about the future.

   In his poem A Psalm of Life, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) says:

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

 Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,— act in the living Present!

 Heart within, and God o’erhead!

 

To conclude, here is a great quote: The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.

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G.R.Kanwal

5th March 2025