248. Accelerating into a wall with eyes fixed on the rear view mirror

There is a famous sentence in the Spanish language: ‘Cualquier tiempo pasado fue mejor’. It translates to ‘Any time past was better’. It is the end of a poem by Jorge Manrique, a XV century stalwart of Spanish literature. It makes me think of how we navigate life, always looking backwards, how we seek guidance from the past when making decisions about the future. I often advise my son on the basis of my experience of when I was his age, a different World, a different time. It is hard not to teach our children to live in a World that no longer exists, but it is critical that we do not do so. We must look forward, use foresight and prediction rather than memory. Values and attitudes are atemporal, applicable to their future in the same way as in our past, but specific actions and practical decisions only make sense in their temporal context. Our experience should be shared, but taking great care that we extricate what no longer applies, the obsolete, to preserve the value of what remains 

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