I Will Live in the Past, the Present, and the Future
Why I need the past to live well in the present.
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” — Ebenezer Scrooge
One of our modern day mantras is to “be present” and to “forget the past.” We’re told to not hyper-fixate on the future, but to ground ourselves solely in the present. As a modern person, I was a bit startled by Scrooge’s declaration to live in the past, present, and future at the end of A Christmas Carol. Isn’t that unhealthy? Won’t living in the past and the future lead to new problems?
Three Spirits visit Scrooge after the ghost of his partner, Jacob Marley. The first shows him the past that has formed him into the greedy, lonely, miserly man he is today. The second shows him the present-day life he has created for himself in contrast to the world around him. The third shows him the bitter end that will come of him because of his present ways.
What I never realized about Scrooge is that he is someone who refuses to accept and regard his past. Several times during his journey through the past, he demands that the Spirit take him away from this place; he can’t stand the sight of the mistakes he made or the pain that he endured as a young boy. Even the woman he once loved predicted this to him when she released him of their engagement: “The memory of what is past half makes me hope you will—have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke.”1 She knows him well enough to realize he will force the end of their love out of his mind and heart, pretending it is but a nightmare.
But it’s this refusal to face the past that makes Scrooge the unpleasant, uncharitable, unloving person he is in the present day.
Because Scrooge refuses to reckon with the past that made him—how he was sent to boarding school by an unkind father and forced to stay there by himself (even through the Christmas holidays), his poverty, how he pushed away the woman he loved—his past forms him according to vice. You can’t escape something you do not look at. Yet he avoids the past because of the bitter feelings it riles up in him; he can’t tolerate the tears and heartache it brings to the surface. This is why in the end when the Spirit still will not take him home and even begins to change its form to look like all the faces from his past, Scrooge can stand it no longer and shoves the Spirit’s extinguishing cap down over its head, striving to put out the Spirit’s light.
Despite how much Scrooge tries to escape his past—extinguish it—he can’t fully rid himself of it. Even as Scrooge covers the candle-light Spirit “with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.”2
The past, whether we acknowledge it or not, will form us, one way or another. The past can warp us with all its bitterness and form us into something vile. Or it can be an illuminating light that reveals our weaknesses, our limits, our sadnesses, and our temptations. It shows us the root of our behaviours and thoughts so that we can truly fix them. Otherwise, we’re only applying bandaids. Or, in Scrooge’s case, not even seeing our faults for what they are; we believe they are what protects us and makes us wise. He doesn’t see how his bitterness and greed harms others or himself—instead, he sees himself as better because of them.
When Scrooge first met this bright Spirit, he saw the extinguishing cap under his arm and begged him to cover his light with it. But the Spirit replied, “Would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!”3
Scrooge is not the only one who has helped make the past’s extinguishing cap.
The past can be a light that forms our present and our future in the best of ways. When we understand the reason behind who we are, the events and people that formed us, we are more equipped to change those broken parts of ourselves and see the faulty forms of protection we’ve erected. The past can make us strive towards something better and greater than what we had and put off the resentment we might be tempted to cling to. But when we don’t know why we’re angry, hurt, or react in certain ways to certain situations, how can we begin to change? It’s when we get to the root of it all that growth sprouts.
The past works as a reminder of who we once were and the situations we once found ourselves in, and thus lends us sympathy and understanding to those who find themselves in similar circumstances. Twice this happened to Scrooge as he was shown his past. Upon seeing himself as a poor, lonely boy, he wished he could have given something to the small child who came carolling on his doorsteps. Then when he saw how kindly his old employer treated him as a young man, he wished he could go and do likewise for Cratchit, who Scrooge himself employs.
Because Scrooge had pushed out his past, he had forgotten what it was like to be a lonely, small boy or a poor young man working for another, which gave him no room for sympathy and kindness for those he encountered who were once just like himself. Up until that point, he saw poverty and youth as something to despise because he so despised his time in those circumstances (his wonder, his powerlessness, his hopefulness), so he treated the poor and young with contempt in the present. It wasn’t until he could see himself clearly in the past and recognize what he needed back then—which was kindness—that he was able to desire to treat them with kindness too.
Scrooge desperately needed his past to teach and remind him, to instruct him on living rightly. But when confronted with his past alone, he grew angry and snuffed out its illuminating light. He needed the present and the future to come to him as well, and further show him what his past had created for him and would create for him in the years to come. Scrooge despised his lonely, poor upbringing and the hopeful young love of his early adulthood. But if he continued living as he did, he would find himself with a future of deeper loneliness and in a place of fire and brimstone with all his earthly riches left behind to be rifled through and misused. He would be in the same condition he wanted so badly to forget: alone and with nothing.
But by grace, Scrooge does change his ways. Upon seeing his past, present, and future together, he no longer pushes out the past but strives to live with it every day—but not just it alone. Scrooge vows to let all three and the lessons they offer inform him daily. That is the key distinction. Scrooge is not vowing to live in only the past, which is another pathway to becoming bitter and angry. He vows to hold all three together, to see the thread that runs through all of them—that if he acts in this way now because of what he experienced in the past, it will create this future.
I can’t help but think of Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, the man with the jacket of many colours. He had a past filled with trauma and heartache: sold into slavery by his brothers, wrongly accused of sexually assaulting his master’s wife, and thrown into prison for years. None of us would blame Joseph for becoming bitter, closed in, raging, depressed, hopeless, and vengeful. We would understand it.
Yet Joseph, in every circumstance he found himself in, let his good character shine and thus rose in position, to the point of becoming Pharaoh’s right-hand man. Joseph was a man informed by his past. That doesn’t mean it still didn’t grieve him (we saw how he broke before his brothers when he finally met them again as Pharaoh’s advisor). Joseph let his past shape him into a man who could lead Egypt through years of famine.
I’m tempted, with my own past, to cloister myself away. As I want to push my past from my memory, I’m tempted to hide myself from deep relationships, from allowing others to see me as I truly am, to refuse to trust that others could love me with my faults and not wield them against me. I’d like to scorn hope and some days believe that true love isn’t real. As Hayley Williams sang in The Only Exception, “Up until now, I had sworn to myself / That I’m content with loneliness / Because none of it was ever worth the risk.” I told myself that I had to “find other ways / To make it alone or keep a straight face.”4
But when I reckon rightly with my past, forcing it to come out of hiding and hold hands with my present and future, I find that love is real and that those from my past who hurt and abandoned me are not the only kind of people that exist. Like Scrooge, I’m learning to live in the past, the present, and the future. And I’m finding love and healing as I do.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843; repr., Thorold, Ontario, Canada: Paper Mill Press, 2021), 43.
Dickens, 46.
Dickens, 29.
“The Only Exception,” track 6 on Paramore, Brand New Eyes, Fueled by Ramen, 2009.
Lara, I reread "A Christmas Carol" every year, and your deep dive here is so rich. Thank you.