Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming.
History is not everything, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.
We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.
