The good old days

The past isn’t as beautiful as we choose to remember it.

The “good old days” aren’t just good. Our recollection of the past is not true - we oversimplify and magnify what we want to remember.

Each time we yearn for the good old days, we forget that we can’t be selective about what part of the past we want re-enacted. Or we remember this, but choose to forget about the parts of the past we don’t want to relive.

We forget that we forget.

We can remind ourselves that choosing the highlights does not erase the worse parts.

The past is the past. We can be grateful it happened. More than that, we can be grateful we all built on it to be where we are today.

The job of the past is to become something that can be built upon.

And that job is long done.