Seeking the Past

Posted on | February 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

Whenever my mom wants me to move on and move forward, she gets fond of quoting The Lion King and specifically, Rafiki, by saying, “It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past!” While she might be right most of the time, so was George Santayana, best known for the varying versions of “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The ideas of the past and history – most especially own our pasts and histories – have been running through my head for the past few weeks, as I’ve been watching the PBS series Faces of America every Wednesday night. In this four-part special, historian Henry Louis Gates explores the family trees and histories of 12 famous Americans, including Meryl Streep, Malcolm Gladwell, Queen Noor, Stephen Colbert, Kristi Yamaguchi and others. The series is focused primarily on the immigrant experience and how these individuals’ families came to the U.S., but it also explores the idea that our pasts and our ancestors play an important role in shaping who we become, even if we don’t always realize it.

Growing up, I often felt like the black sheep of my family. I was convinced I didn’t quite fit in: an introvert surrounded by extroverts, bookish and intellectual in a sea of social butterflies, musically inclined with two parents who could barely carry a tune. That feeling of being different has developed into a real curiosity to figure out just where my abilities and personality traits came from since it isn’t glaringly obvious. But more than that, I want to learn more about the unique confluence of events that led to me being me.

When we think about all of the things that had to happen first in order for any of us to be here today, it’s pretty overwhelming. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II. One was a prisoner of war. What if he hadn’t been rescued? What if he hadn’t survived? Thinking back even further to any one of my immigrant ancestors, what if they had decided to stay in their home country? What if their ship sank? They could have contracted some kind of illness or disease. Any one small change at any moment in history and I wouldn’t be here – or, at least, I wouldn’t be here as I am today.

Dwelling on the past and forgetting to live in the present doesn’t work out so well. But learning from the past can help inform the present (and the future). After years of immigrants deliberately shedding any ethnic identity to fully assimilate into American society, we now celebrate those differences and embrace them. Digging through the past is a way of reclaiming our histories and making sure that the unique attributes that make us who we are aren’t lost for future generations.

It’s also, for me, a way to connecting to my family, the family that always felt so different from me. My paternal grandfather passed away several years ago before I really had a chance to get to know him and I didn’t want to lose the opportunity with my other grandparents. I even composed a series of questions for them, asking them to tell me as much as they could about their own parents and grandparents. As unique as their own lives are, it’s been enlightening to find tiny pieces of myself in them and to see how those tiny pieces eventually add up to me.

There’s still so much I don’t know, so much I still want to know. In some ways, it seems like an endless journey and it would be easy to get caught up in chasing the past at the expense of the here and now. At the same time, I think there’s merit in learning from our ancestors so that we have the insight we need to make we don’t, as Santayana warns, repeat the mistakes of our past.

Plus, on a purely selfish and superficial level, I’d really like to know who to blame for my ridiculously bad myopia.

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