© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 66
Remember that story that we all got at school, about the sheep and the goats. I guess I’m a goat, and an unrepentant one at that. If you want me to do something, you have a better chance of telling me not to do it and, even then, the odds of me doing it depend on the fullness of the moon and my energy levels.
I have always had a thing against sheep, other than for eating or to provide clothing. I see no virtue in being a sheep, only stupidity. Sheep are the workers of the world, but without a labour movement to look after their interests. The only organization they have is the form of the herd.
Sheep and goats are not particularly interesting, unless you are a farmer or if you take the metaphor as symptomatic of human perceptions. I am not a farmer, so this column will spare you the topic of animal husbandry, but I am quite happy to go into the human condition.
It seems that there is a dichotomy, a dual perception, in just about everything we think about, just like the sheep and the goats. There are men and women, children and adults, homosexuals and heterosexuals, right and wrong, black and white, good guys and bad guys and a whole bunch of other etceteras.
From this point on it gets really interesting. You get people who read, and people who choose not to. There are people who like cats, and people who don’t. There are childless couples and nuclear families. You get Americans and everyone else. And ultimately it all boils down to us and them.
Life is a coin with only two sides. The chances of it landing on the rim are astronomically small, especially given that the playing field is only level in months beginning with the letter R.
To my mind the most fundamental differentiator between us and them is those who look to the past and those who look to the future. This may seem unimportant compared to the difference between people who drive new cars and those who drive second hand models, or people who eat chili and those who break out in hives at the mere mention of the word ‘curry’, but I believe that it is probably one of the most far-reaching dichotomies in the human make-up.
I’m going to start this out by saying that I live for tomorrow. Nostalgia is the mental version of a hangover that you get from all the good times yesterday. The only way to truly get rid of a hangover is to wait for tomorrow to happen.
I find that people who reference the past, are generally about as starved for happiness as a bunch of monks on the twentieth day of Lent. As they put so much effort into enjoying what was ‘then’, they have terminal difficulties finding some pleasure in ‘now’.
They can always tell you how well things worked in the ‘good old days’, and how you are doing everything wrong. Their difficulty seems to be seeing how things might be done in future. Because they idealise the past, they tend not to see the uglier aspects, and are prone to repeating the mistakes that were made then.
People who live in the past say, “In our days, we didn’t do that sort of thing.” What makes them think that sort of thing was ‘ours’ in the first place. They seem to get a kick out of correcting people and the ersatz self-righteousness of moral approbation.
People who live for tomorrow are a different kettle of fish altogether. Unlike yesterday’s souls, they always have something to look forward to, and if they don’t, you will usually find them plotting and scheming to make tomorrow a better place.
Interestingly
enough, before they can get to tomorrow, they usually have work to do,
so people who live for tomorrow are probably more productive than most.
The difference between people who live in the past and people who live
for tomorrow is as wide as the gap between pessimism and optimism.
There is an old expression that ‘you can’t cry over spilt milk’ The problem with milk that spills is that if not wiped up, it forms a sticky, sour mess. There may be lessons in the past, but there is a fresh appeal in the thought of all the joy that tomorrow will bring.
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