The clock marches forward, never pausing for an instant, running as it were by the gravity of necessity.

A man’s actions and its consequences are separated more often than not by a long stretch of time. Between the two a man does what he does best — he forgets. Imagine for an instant what kind of insights would be grasped if the space between cause and effect was no more, so that the two touched. It is in their meeting that lessons can be learned immediately, left undeniably as truths to which one cannot escape. This is beyond the grasp of ordinary thinking and experience, where the lag of time compels us to forget how where we were is connected to where we are. A man, instead, busies himself with the dreams of where he wishes to go, be it to whatever pleasures he imagines to be his lot and calling.

Not a single detail of our past is lost. Everything is stored away in the basement, collecting dust and losing luster, but still quite alive. The flavours we had tasted, scents we had smelled, spurts of emotion, and the thoughts which twirled from flights of fancy, all remain within the dormant recesses of our memory. Be sure of it, they are there. Like undeveloped film from the footage of a camera, they exist as half-steeped recollections which rarely, if ever, return to our conscious minds. Yet the opportunity and possibility persists that a man, capable of realizing their worth and value, may return one day to remember what had been.

We cannot diminish, nor destroy, the space between one moment of time and the next. For us time is an objective law which is inexorably immune of any persuasion or manipulation. The only way to reap the rewards of recollection, developing the films of our memory so as to bring them all to light, is to halt our indulgence to thoughts of tomorrow. It is to this task that man will compromise all the necessary discipline, for the sake of avoiding the perceived boredom associated to it, and try with all his might to forget its value in order to return to idle comforts. After all, to remember the past takes time, effort and a very strong desire.

Common men talk much about wisdom, assuming that it cannot be lost and that it is an automatic virtue of age and experience. To whatever case this may be true, it is with great gravity that we must admit that, in comparison to what breadth of wisdom lies dormant, we are but holders of cheap and shallow trinkets. It is in our avoidance of the past, in our defiance to the completion of a chore which we owe to the deepest part of ourselves, that we betray the possibility of a new tomorrow. By his ordinary inclinations a man will always tend to feed the beast of tomorrow an outrageously disproportionate share relative to the scant portions alloted to the puppies of past and present.