Live For Today, Look Forward, Not Back to Past

1912

Heart to Heart Talks
By EDWIN A. NYE

LOOKING BACKWARD.

Do you remember the legend about that ancient Greek from whom Apollo took "the backward looking mind?"

All things became new.

The world was transformed to that Greek. For the first time he saw how beautiful was the world. Flowers he had not yet seen bloomed under his feet, new stars shone over his head and the changing moods of nature filled him with delight.

Why?

The change was not in the world but in the Greek. His mind had been turned backward to the happiness and the grief of the past. Now he looked outward and forward to the beauty and the joy all about him.

In our day is no Apollo to take away the backward looking mind, more's the pity.

But the symbolism holds.

Many of us need to have our mind reversed.

I know a woman who persists in looking backward and who always tells of a day when her people were rich and accustomed to many luxuries she is now denied. She is constantly deploring a situation she cannot help. She does not live save in a former day.

Worse than Lot's wife, who took a single look over her shoulder, she always faces backward.

I know a man whose constant theme of regret is the fact that he ever changed his business. He did well, he says, at the old place and was a fool to change. Certainly he is doing little good at his new place, largely for the reason that he is forever harking backward to the old.

He needs an Apollo.

Older persons are apt to foster the backward looking habit. Says grandpa from his chimney corner: "There are no days like the good old days. Now, when I was young" —

Poor grandpa!

He magnifies the past, minimizes the present and omits the future. He is dying, like some trees, at the top.

You cannot change the past, but you can discount the present and spoil the future by refusing to live in the one and to face the other.

To be successful, to stay young, to find happiness, cultivate the outward looking, forward looking mind.

Face the sun.

When you stand with your back to it the shadow is in front of you. When you face the sun the shadow is behind.

—The Janesville Daily Gazette, Janesville, WI, July 22, 1912, page 4.