Learning From One's Past

 It is said that we learn from our past...  and without clarification, one is not completely sure what that entails.

Do we look back 20 years, I am now learning this from my past...  or do we learn as we age?  

We are constantly living in the present, if you had not thought much about it and that present is always pushing us towards our future, so from one second to the next, we have created a past - present - and a future.

I pick up my coffee cup and spill it because I was not paying attention to picking up the cup.  That action began in my present but immediately went into my past, as my present moved into the future.

So, I learned instantly.

I did not wait 20 years, look back and ask myself what did I learn from spilling my cup of coffee twenty years ago.

We can look at history and conclude that the actions taken 200 years ago were wrong...  but can we actually apply that learning process to similar actions 200 years later, since much has changed?  Obviously, we will make different decisions because of different circumstances and learned almost right away, if that was the right thing to do or not.

In other words, I don't think we actually learn that much from the past at all whether it is our past or someone else's past.