Understanding Our Past to Make a Better Future

                “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

When we forget our past, we’re bound to repeat it. That’s just as true for individuals as it is for businesses and governments. That’s why it’s extremely important for children to learn actual world history. Not political leaning propaganda versions of it.

It’s important that we learn from what happened in Germany in WWII, regarding the Jewish internment camps. Just as it’s important to understand human trafficking that’s been occurring for thousands of years. Around the world, as of the writing of this article, there are 167 countries that still have organized slavery. Click here to read more on that.  

Believe it or not, in order to pay off some type of debt, there are individuals who voluntarily enter into slavery. Here is more information on voluntary slavery. Even the world we live in now is inducive of voluntary slavery. Take the home mortgage as an example.

The word mortgage comes from the Old French (Latin) words, “mort” and “gage.” Mort meaning “death” and gage which means “pledge.” Though the death part could be misconstrued, it simply means that the loan is dead once it’s paid off. The loan taker promises to pay back the loan giver. It’s a pledge voluntarily taken to pay-off a debt. The person has, in essence, voluntarily become a slave to the lender. A concept that wasn’t taught during my time in school, primary through graduate.

For more information on the history of mortgages, click here.

When we decide not to teach our past, we’re bound to repeat it. That means, when we don’t teach of both our successes and failures, we’re literally setting the next generation up for failure.

Just as we should teach the next generation the history of our country, we should use our individual pasts to teach and learn from as well. To help avoid repeating past mistakes.

Your past doesn’t have to define you or your future.

We’ve all made mistakes that we wish we could undue. If you were offered the opportunity to go back in time, to undue a decision you made, would you?

I know I would. I’m sure for many others the answer yes as well. We’d choose yes because we know that by changing our past, we’d essentially change our present as well. And more often than not, those who said yes are not happy with the consequences of certain decisions.

It’s important to understand though, if we could change our past, it would change our present too. Including everything we would’ve known between that decision and now. Those past decisions have made us who we are. Rather than want to change the past, we should learn from it.

Learn from your past mistakes.

As humans, we make decisions every day. Some are easy while others are complex. Just as some are good, and others are rather poor. It’s through these decisions that we gain experience. As a result of those experiences, we’re able to make better decisions.

Dwell on that for a moment. We must learn from our past experiences (both good and bad), in order to make better decisions. Therefore, if we remove our poor decisions, how could we possibly know how to make better ones? Especially knowing that we’d only have half of the picture.

It’s impractical to expect someone to make good, solid decisions based on only part of the information. Who among us would go to a surgeon who’d never performed, or been a part of, a surgical procedure before? In the same manner, we can’t respond effectively without having the proper perspective.

Knowing the information, of the past, gives us a major leg-up when it comes to making good decisions. Learning from the mistakes/experiences of others is just as legitimate as our own. It’s even better because we didn’t have to make the mistake or poor decision.         

Think beyond your present circumstances.

We should think beyond our current circumstances in order to make solid, long-lasting decisions. If we make all of our choices, based on the here and now, we could find ourselves having to make the same ones over and over again. Thinking long-term will help alleviate that.

Emergency situations can call for certain unanticipated reactions. Those types are hard to predict. Nonetheless, we can still prepare for them. This is done through “what-if” scenarios.

In the constructs of “what-if” scenarios, it’s important to anticipate what has the potential of happening. Whether it ever happens or not is irrelevant. Preparing for it means thinking up the scenario, then finding the solution to the problem before it presents itself.

When we look beyond where we currently find ourselves, we can make long-term decisions. Ones that can stay true when we get beyond our present situation.

Pass along what you’ve learned.

The more we do this the better we will become at it. Good decision making becomes standard practice. It will be like second nature to us.

Once we’ve mastered this, or at least have become very good at it, we should pass along what we’ve learned. Remember, it’s better to learn from someone else’s mistakes/experiences than our own. Pass along your experiences to others. Help them so they don’t have to go through what you could help them avoid. Hopefully, they will learn from our mistakes, and of those who’ve gone before us, in order to make a better future.