June 26, 2015　=========
☆ one’s past　～の素性
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Have you heard of Soren Kierkegaard? He was a Danish philosopher, who lived in the 1800’s, and died very young – at age 42 – but has many ideas and thoughts attributed to him. One of those is thinking about life and one’s past. He said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
I really like this idea – so true, don’t you think? We can really only learn from our past, it’s not possible to change one’s past, right? And naturally we can’t learn from the future – the only way to live life is to live it forward into the present and future.
I think you can take this on a very basic level too, when I was living in Japan, sometimes someone would talk to me in Japanese and I wouldn’t understand, but later on in the day, I’d realize, “Oh!!! That’s what they were talking about!!” I couldn’t go back to the person or the conversation and say, “I got it! I understand what you mean now!” but I could take that understanding with me into the future and use it to help me understand better in future conversations.
Bye,
Chris