Nothing of lasting value can be taken from the past. Nostalgia and wistfulness are slimy, blasphemous miscreants that entrap our feet in quicksand and then inexorably suck us down into a cesspool of treacly sentimentality. The past is an amorphous vacuum which, and this is true only if you happen to be one of a chosen few, you somehow manage to escape its clutches to live on and fight another day with your spirit intact and your body facing forward. The rest of humanity? Sad. The past takes everyone else prisoner while condemning them to an eternal existence of facing backward with their lives perpetually in rewind, listening to Bruce Springsteen bemoan the “Glory Days” over and over again while they ponder the endless what-ifs and what-might-have-beens indigenous to any organic existence, be it an amoeba’s or a lemur’s or a preposterously intelligent hominid’s. Pitiful when you stop and think about it, isn’t it??
Fred's Soapbox 