Saturday, November 21, 2015

Past Is Past

I don't usually like to talk about or even think about the past, not because there are things from there that have hurt me before that I do not wish to remember, but that the past is there for a reason.

It has passed.

People and places from the past tend to remain there for me because they rarely have any relevance to the present and the future. Those who are still relevant and are meaningful and dear have followed me from the past and into the present, while those who were merely contextual friends would remain as they were within that context, until and unless attempts are made to update their relevance to where things are now.

I bring this up because I have learnt recently that my old secondary school is about to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary of founding. And I'm not even apologetic in not wanting to go back there to visit them.

They have become irrelevant to my present and future.

When I went back about a year or so after graduating from it, all they could remember of me was the fact that I had bad skin. None of what I had done mattered---they could not identify me as anything else other than ``the kid with the bad skin'' despite all the crazy [awesome] things I had done.

That was when I threw my hands up metaphorically and gave up attempting to keep in contact with them.

Now, as the days pass on by and the number of people I meet up as a part of my job increases, some of these people from the past are slowly catching up to me. But they don't bother me much, a quick but vague acknowledgement with sufficient delay is enough to dissuade anyone from pursuing the past any more than it is necessary.

After all, shouldn't it be more important to understand what a person is now than what the person was before?

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