I always debate between the topics for these newsletters. Should I attempt to explain a topic or launch into a series that might help to clarify an issue? Or should I write about something that struck me this week in my personal life? It is not much of a debate because much of the time I am writing this newsletter to unburden my mind from the fatigue of carrying whatever thought has attached itself to my conscious. So, this week I will unburden my mind and save my so-called legal erudition for next time (maybe).
The past is a sticky wicket. I feel that anytime I have made progress the trail becomes slick forcing me to slip and stumble forward. To my credit, I am perpetually moving forward but stumbling and bumbling nonetheless. Forward progress is always marked by innovation. The past morphs into history once we have learned the necessary lessons to entrench those events into previous times no longer lingering in the present. My struggle is the Herculean task of avoiding pattern repeat. Can I keep the past the past? The siren songs of old patterns that are hell bent on being unearthed to splatter the present momentum. We lie to ourselves in a warped rationalization that we can tackle the old with new thoughts and new ideas. That is inaccurate the new can’t fix the old. Those old situations are cemented in the context of history and nothing in the future can change those old events. We like to tell ourselves that we can revise history, but the reality is that those situations are like marble statues carved into permanence. We can only hope that we keep moving forward digging up new dirt to be thrown on the past. A personal Vesuvius to be unearthed and studied by future generations as a potential map to avoid on their journeys.
Albert R. Hartley
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