Personal Essay

br How Does One 's Relationship to One 's Past Influence One 's Present

Everyone needs to have a clear understanding of where he or she wants to go in the future through knowing what one has learned through the past The key to this understanding is self-awareness and acceptance of our personality , culture , and all the events that have shaped us , both positive and negative . We must be able to identify our biases and ability to be objective or subjective , subject to what we have been socialized to know . In to be

objective and engage in the future we must realize the effect that others have had on our socialization process and question this . To go on to be aesthetically , academic thinkers , we must begin as a clean slate ' with a connection to our past , but not a reliance on this past zone of comfort . We must undertake the difficult process of realizing that we may not really know what we think we know . Parents may have guided us with the best intentions , but without all the facts . To be connected with the people in our past , requires that we understand and appreciate their wisdom and teachings , but that we must now begin to question all of this . It is not a move of disrespect or disregard , but instead , the first step to appreciating others values and thoughts , different from ours . We can then , begin to form our own selves more fully and fruitfully

The future can be daunting in its ambiguity . We may be full of questions and fears of it . But , we have all seen successes and failures in a past , in some regard , and have learned from these experiences . We have all been applauded or antagonized and have learned to overcome criticism and to take ownership of our positive deeds . From this past experience , comes our preparation for the pros and cons of each of our undertakings in the future . We have learned what it is like to be judged and , hopefully can connect to the past , to not judge others and be open and willing to new ideas , people , and places . We cannot be captives of the past , we need to free ourselves for the uncertain freedom of getting to know ourselves and the world around us in a better way

The past will always be the past and is static in its position in our lives . We must come to accept the constantly moving present to the future and learn to be quick in our studies and our attendance Hopefully , the past has prepared us for a constantly evolving world and future . If it has not , we must quickly learn to be quick . We may want to reminisce about slower and safer times , but we were young in the past , so we must learn to be adults . No matter what our age , we constantly grow in knowledge and ability to use our wisdom , so our past must be viewed as both our childhood and...