Sooner or Later You Have to Give Up the Hope of A Better Past
Sometimes we hear someone say something and we know it is important. These statements are little planetary systems whose gravity constantly pulls new satellites into its orbit. Once you hear one of these phrases, you do not quite know what to do with them – except that you feel compelled to understand them and explore their meaning.
The fact that you cannot ignore a phrase or saying is an interesting phenomenon. It is as if these phrases are like a Zip file on your computer. Once you unpack it, you realise one file actually contains much more information than you could have ever expected.
The title of the article is such a phrase for me. It is attributed to the psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom from his book “Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death”. I only heard it this week being used by another person on a podcast and immediately made a note of it.
This is not a book review, nor an article promoting anyone's work – it is me attempting to answer a question: Why does this phrase resonate with me?
Nostalgia
As I have become older, I have often reflected on how conversations with my peers focus on a glorious past. This nostalgia has the potential to boost your mood, strengthen social connections, enhance self-esteem, and provide a comforting sense of meaning from past experiences. Likewise, it has the potential to lead you to excessively idealise a past that may have never really existed, causing dissatisfaction with your present life. Nostalgia is often shared with others and appears to be a natural part of the human condition as we age. Who would not want to reminisce on personal triumphs and map the journey to their current successes in life? It may be annoying for younger people around you, but it may well be a source of inspiration for them to become more ambitious for success.
When I heard this phrase, I did not consider it to be about nostalgia. It was something more empirical, and at its heart was an indivisible truth.
Two become one
Many of us in our lives will experience a tragedy. Invariably, it will be a traumatic experience that we will carry forward into the rest of our lives. For me, the first such tragedy I truly recognised, though from a distance, occurred many years ago when I was a student. I was a student, and I was on several courses with two identical twins. I knew them both as most people did – superficially. You may have had a conversation with one of them, but you were never quite sure which one. I imagine both these ladies must have said hello and politely responded to people who mistook them for their sister too many times to mention.
Tragedy struck this family when one of the sisters was involved in an unfortunate accident and died. Word quickly spread around the campus. They were recognisable as twins, who were always seen together with a spring in their step. These two young ladies had grown up to lead a life more interconnected than most of us could ever understand. Still to this day, one of the saddest things I have seen was the surviving sister walking through the campus for the first time. She knew everyone recognised her as the sister who survived. On that day, her head was bowed, and her gait was lifeless. She was no longer a twin – two had become one.
This is a real tragedy
I believe this was the first time I was forced to contemplate a tragedy so severe that I had no way to understand how anyone could get past it. I had just turned 20 years old and, like most people of my age, needed something big and symbolic to occur relatively close to us. Only then could we start to appreciate the gravitas of what it might mean for the individuals involved.
I have often wondered how this young woman fared without her twin sister as she moved through the rest of her life. Prior to social media, few of us could easily maintain ties with people at the edges of our social circles. These were often nice people, but time and circumstance limited our ability to know them better. This shows how the social 'backdrop' we collectively create – shaped then by physical proximity and available time – dictates our interactions. Just like a painted set on a stage, this social environment is essential for us to navigate our world and play our individual roles. As a result, we can never know the small effect our lives had on others. At the very least we all made each other's lives appear real. At the very least we all made each other’s lives appear real.
The Hope of a Better Past
Certain events echo through our lives as we move forward. In the example that I have just described, I hope most compassionate people would long for a narrative in which both sisters somehow survived. As irrational as this sounds, and knowing this can never happen, we still want to feel some hope in the story.
Now imagine how people at the centre of any tragedy must feel. They yearn for a better past knowing it will never happen. This counterintuitive emotion is so deeply entwined with our identity after a tragic event. We can be haunted by pondering what our lives would have looked like if the tragedy had never occurred, or if somehow it had not been so bad as to cause the death or vastly diminish a life.
This feeling appears to transcend the reality of our lives that have been thrown onto a different course. I have written about how we act out our lives as if the potential future is real in the article 'How Important is Our Potential Future?'. It is very hard to live in the present when we are building for a potential future that is based on a past that we are still hoping could be better.
Giving Up
When we talk about giving up, it can sound as if we are deflated or lacking the required moral fibre to complete a task. This is true in some scenarios, when we walk away after not giving our best efforts. We are giving up in the present – not in the past. Giving up hope that the past could or should be different is accepting past events and all the effects they have had in shaping your life and identity. You will be giving up on a past version of yourself that can no longer exist in the present and thus the future. This will remodel how we perceive our potential selves.
What Remains of the Day
As for me, I am not sure, and perhaps I will never be sure, about how to give up on hoping for a better past. I lost my son, and I want him back. I want him back for me and the rest of my family. I want him back so I can watch him grow into a man. As I write this, I know it is nonsense and irrational, but there is a feeling in the deepest part of my soul that still hopes. I think this is why the phrase has struck such a chord with me. This is the challenge for us all. How do we transcend our pasts when the last embers of hope are so intimately tied to our loved ones who remain there?
The past we wish for is a hopeless cause. We need to accept a future with a different potential that is built on the reality of the past. It is unfair to judge every new day and its opportunities against a ‘potential’ day stemming from a past that cannot exist.