Category: Past

How Important Is Preservation?

To be able to learn from the past, we need to preserve it. But what happens when preservation keeps us from improving?

Most people are familiar with preservation, at least in basic form. If you live in a historic city or area, you are likely familiar with one or more buildings that have been designated a historical landmark.

Similarly, important historical figures often donate their papers and effects to a library. For instance, the Boston University’s Mugar Library has the papers, correspondence, and effects that belonged to noted author Isaac Asimov. They are preserved for historians to study.

Of course, preservation doesn’t have to be limited to famous people. You’ve probably thought about how you might preserve your own belongings. Perhaps you have a photo album, or keep postcards or letters you have received. Maybe you have a home safe or special location to store important documents. These might include the deed to a home, a wedding certificate, high school and/or college diploma, social security card, passport, and so on.

And yet, knowing what to keep and what to get rid of can be very difficult. Your email inbox, for instance, likely gets some important documents that you’d like to keep. Probably, it also gets flooded with unimportant messages of all kinds. Do you bother to sift through the contents to keep the wheat and eliminate the chaff? If not, is it because you don’t think it is worth your time?

Also, sometimes you have to tear down the old in order to build the new. Can we reconcile the need to save the past as well as make a better future?

Related questions: What possessions of yours will someone want when you die? What advice would you give your past self? Is life today better than in the past?

 

 

Relive The Past Or Look To The Future?

Which do you do more often: look to the future, or relive the past? Nostalgia has a strong pull, but it’s fun to dream about what lies ahead.

Share why if you wish.

Relive The Past Or Look To The Future?
Results

How Do You See The Future?

It can be difficult to see months into the future, let alone years or decades. How do you see what lies ahead?

Reality serves us a constant reminder that we don’t know what is going to happen. At the start of the football season, we don’t know who is going to win the Super Bowl. We can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. People who invest in the stock market can only hope a particular stock will go up in price.

And yet, despite all the evidence that shows we cannot accurately predict the future, some people seem awfully sure about what will happen next. News pundits, op-ed columnists, and politicians all seem certain they know exactly what will happen. Not to mention psychics and tarot card readers.

With that in mind, how do you think about what tomorrow will bring?

Perhaps you view the future with optimism. Tomorrow, you might expect, will be better than today. But, of course, there is no guarantee that this is true.

Or you might think that instead, we can expect the future to be very much like the present (or the past). After all, the sun rose yesterday, it rose this morning, and it will rise tomorrow. But we know that sometimes there are changes, including big ones. The COVID-19 pandemic caught nearly everyone by surprise, and that was an obvious case where the future (say, April 2020) didn’t resemble the past (February 2020).

When you think about the future, how do you make predictions, and how do you react to those predictions? What does that mean for your present?

Related questions: Should we try to predict the future? How much does your past determine your future? Will the future be better than the present? How do you plan for the future?

What Sport Did You Gravitate Toward In High School?

Did you play a sport in high school? Or did you find yourself attending the games of one in particular, even if you didn’t play?

Share why if you wish.

Why Do We Remember What We Remember?

Memory, and what we happen to remember, is a mysterious thing. No one really knows the details of how memories are formed, physically, in the brain.

Bur apart from the question of the mechanics of memory formation, it is equally mysterious how it is determined exactly what is remembered, and what is quickly forgotten. It would be impossible to remember absolutely everything, so most of us naturally ignoring or forgetting most things going on around us.

But how, then, does our brain decide what to keep and what to discard?

Certainly, we can try to commit certain things to memory. Repetition is a good way to learn something, but it is not very efficient.

But what about those things that just naturally become lodged in our brain? The earworm, for example, that you don’t try to remember, but plays on an endless loop, seemingly by itself. Or perhaps you recall the lyrics of a song you heard once or twice on the radio more than a decade ago, but details from yesterday are already fuzzy.

One oddity is that different people remember different things. One person, for example, might find that people’s names are easy to remember, while another might find that faces are easier to recall. Similarly, some people find it easier to learn directions by the names of streets; others by landmarks on the route.

Have you thought about why a certain passage from a book stays with you, while most of the rest gets forgotten? Or why one song on an album lingers in memory, but the others don’t? You don’t necessarily remember the best bits, but rather those things that, for whatever reason, resonate with you.

Why do we remember what we remember?

Related questions: Does your memory define you? What is the earliest memory you have? How do you want to be remembered?