It’s true that the past is all we’ve experienced, and the past doesn’t change. It’s also true that most of us use our experience to inform the decisions we make in the present. This keeps us from touching the hot stove a second time. We touch it once and are afraid to touch it again. Fear protects us, and fear also keeps us from taking risk, from stepping out of our comfort zone, from taking on challenges in which we might fail: “I can’t do that” is a flight reaction. Our memory tells us “no” because something happened a certain way last month, or last year, or in 2010. If I do X, then Y will happen.
Many of us live, work and behave as if our futures are somehow pre-determined by our past, as if we are prisoners to the memory of our personal experiences. None of this must be so.
Imagine the difference between thinking to yourself, “I can’t do that” and “I haven’t done that yet.”
In Hamlet, Shakespeare describes the life to come as “the undiscovered country.” Here and now, however, tomorrow is the undiscovered country. Does the past exist? Sure. But only as an image. A recollection. My father died many years ago, but the degree to which I feel or am guided by my experiences with him is a present choice. I may feel an obligation to my past, but it’s a phantom.
When we remember our past it’s essentially like remembering a story. When I read a novel, play, or poem or see a film, those events are in my past too, same as the moments I recollect as personal tragedies or triumphs. I also remember the tragedies and triumphs of so many characters. Are those memories less mine or less real than the ones I have of interacting with my own father? My strong desire for his praise as a boy undoubtedly influenced my strong desire for approval from older, established men in my early professional life. At the same time, the identity I created in my mind of what a professional should be was almost certainly influenced by any number of images, passages in books, even television advertisements—most of them lost to my memory.
We exist in the present moment. It is the point from which we plan, visualize or imagine forward. At the same time, my expectations are always with me always preceding my thoughts.
We live as if changing the past is impossible, but we do it all the time. Our recollections of the past are fluid. For example, I remember events, conversations and relationships differently from my friends, the very people I had them with. If memory is not a perfect record but an idealized one, that’s liberating: I don’t have to be held hostage to the sequence of events that brought me to this place and time.
We often hear that the best indicator of future success is past performance, but one thing the past cannot anticipate is innovation, breakthrough, that which violates the pattern of expectation.
Dick Fosbury is a kind of illustration of this. He was a high school track and field athlete who specialized in the high jump. At the time, there were three very well established techniques. All jumpers planted foot about a step from the bar, launched themselves upward, and landed on their feet or feet and hands. The world and Olympic records were set using this technique. In other words, it was the way the past told athletes to do it—and it worked. Then along came Fosbury. By the mid 1960’s high jumpers were landing on padded surfaces, not wood chips or gravel, so Dick figured he could land on his back. Which meant he could fly backward over the high bar.
When he used this technique at a high school meet, the local newspaper ran a headline derisively describing his jump this way: “Fosbury Flops Over Bar.”
Four years later, Fosbury set an Olympic Record in the 1968 Mexico City games. Today, the Fosbury Flop is the standard technique, the one used by all of the world and Olympic record holders for the past 10 Olympics.
The path that brought us to this moment is both fixed and variable, but the path ahead is not a path at all. The way forward does not exist until we choose it.