The past VS The future

The past may not be an exact predictor of the future, but without knowledge of the past, we have nothing to rely on to deal with the challenges of the future.

No one knows for sure what will happen in the future. A philosopher once said ： ”The world is ceaselessly changing, and the only one that won’t change is change itself”. The remark above illustrates the point that our world is changing and none can know what would happen in the future, which has been embodied incisively in our daily life. Such as how to forecast a student in high school which city to go to for college education, what occupation to be engaged in, and which city he or she will finally take foot in; how can a government official, who is intoxicated in the luxury daily life and squander, full of romantic obsession under neon-light, imagine that he would spend the rest of his life in jail; how can a young girl, itching to spend hours and hours in wrapping up her image, be convinced that she would be the shrew, who is bargaining slovenly with a peddler just for several bucks in the road. Everything in the world is developing without stop, every minute, every second, no matter we have been aware of it or not. Just like a sentence in the lyric of a song,” What was once the sea has now changed into mulberry fields, let alone human’s life?”                   

However, knowledge of the past tells us what might happen in the future. The occurrence of nothing is accidental and the future is accumulating and developing from the past, which means that the future is basically determined by the past. For instance, a middle school student who desires to go to Harvard, however, makes no efforts, sleeps in class, and never studies after class. From the situation above, we can easily get the judgment that his Harvard dream might never come true. Not only in the college entrancing exam, but also in other aspects, the past contributes to the future. These always happen in our everyday life: A child, whose parents do not teach it well and only connive and pamper it by all means, usually won’t piety their parents when grows up; similarly, if the governors oppress and exploit people for a long period of time, making their life filled with untold suffering, this political regime will surely fall from power sooner or later.

The wisdom of the past provides necessary resources to help us confront the old and new problems of the future. We always hear the word of “experience”, which actually illustrates the question of using the wisdom of the past to solve the future problems which are similar to the old ones happened in the past. Such as the experience of years of curing patients makes an experienced doctor more easily to bring the dying back to life; the experience of solving contradicts and embarrasses makes the manager of a grand hotel calm and collected to deal with all kinds of complaints from the guests; the experience of being the governor of a state or in other official position can help a new elected President capable enough to administer a great and proud country. All these people above may have to deal with many problems, which they have never faced with, and may be more complex than the old ones, however, the wisdom from the past help them complete the challenges successfully. It is the same in our daily life, and the motto that “the old possess the most wisdom” also proves the same truth.  

Without the past, there won’t be the future and the future is inevitable result of the accumulation and development of the past. The development of the past leads to the consequence that we cannot forecast the future in details. However, because of the accumulation, we can conveniently estimate the trend of the future. Furthermore, according to the estimated trend, we can adjust our pace in order to make it emerging the trend of future as we hope.