"The past is never dead..."

The American writer and 1949 Nobel Laureate William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  It's probably one of his most famous quotes and comes from the book, Requiem for a Nun, published in 1951.  I love this quote, but it's perhaps useful to share the full passage in order to provide additional context:

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

In other words, we are all products of the choices we have made, both the good ones as well as the bad.  Most of the challenges that we face in life, to some degree, are of our own creation and due to choices we've made in the past.  Faulkner would have us believe that, at least to some extent, we are the product of the choices that our parents and grandparents made too.  Regardless of whether you agree with Faulkner that everyone is the product of the choices they made as well as the ones their ancestors made, I do firmly believe that one can change his or her destiny.  But that doesn't mean that we can forget our past.  Sometimes, the only way to move forward is to look backward.  As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." 

We would do well to remember the past (see my post "Past is Prologue"), but we also need to look forward into the future.    Learn from the past - both your failures as well as your successes.  Don't repeat the same mistakes.