The Past

 

 

 

THE FULLNESS OF TIME

 

        I rather think of time as a sort of compost heap. Everything we have ever been and done, everything we have ever known, either from personal experience or the testimony of others, becomes a part of that compost heap.

        But, of course, as anyone who composts knows, the things thrown into that heap don’t just sit there unchanged in one big lump. They undergo constant change, breaking down, interacting with one other, endlessly revealing new order and new meanings.

When I engage in memory, I am not just looking at the static record of past experiences, I am constantly interpreting and evaluating and analyzing those experiences, looking for their deepest meaning. And, of course, I am constantly adding things to the heap.

 

 In a sense, the present could be thought of as the topmost layer of the compost heap, the surface, the point where new things are growing in the compost and being added in turn.

 

        In a real sense, the present is not something different in kind from the past, it is the surface of the past.

The past makes growth possible, and growth, becoming, is by its very nature an intention of the future, of the beyond.

 

 The Greek verbs phuo and phuteuo, to grow and to plant, respectively, are etymologically related, in fact, to the word” future”. The future is in fact nothing more than the awareness, in the present that grows out of the past, that the process of becoming is real and is conceivable only if it is open.

If it stopped with this instant, it would not be a becoming, and the whole thing would collapse in on itself.

 

        So there is really nothing more profoundly creative than the reflection on the past in memory, whether individual or collective.