To Be Ignorant of the Past is to Remain a Child

Ilham AFREJ is an undergraduate student at ENCG (Ecole Nationale de Commerce et de Gestion), Agadir. She is specialised in International trade. Writing articles is her passion.





Agadir, Morocco

Never found someone who cares enough to bother me. The past does!

I hate you (Hate is a strong word).

I don’t like you, but I always remember you!

Incessantly present in your life, the past can either make you fall to the bottom or help you survive and know how to define yourself.

No matter how many years pass, it takes no time to embrace the past again. If you are badly attached to it, the past opens widely and easily its doors for you, especially in times of emptiness, stress and sadness. The more you dig, the more you lose yourself and the more your mind enjoys broadcasting the videos of your past. Whether it’s because of the bitterness of guilt or because of your elusive search of non-significant excuses, you become the victim of your own crime, and once you pull the trigger, you become a prisoner of the past. You declare war against yourself! It looks like a nostalgic feeling at the beginning, but it’s deceitful as it hides deep inside a frightening truth. Nothing’s scarier than the past and its black and dark shades. The further you go, the more enigmatic and dramatic your journey becomes, and the more you swim, the riskier it becomes as the probability of you drowning increases in the ocean of your illusions. 

Constant conflicts between what really happened and what you wanted to happen are screaming loudly in your mind, but silence is the only answer for your pain. Your head’s burning! You feel nearly nothing! Half of your head is fire-frozen, and the other half is dead. Blood finds no way to circulate, and you have a lack of oxygen going in to your mind.

You’re falling, slowly falling but perhaps heading to the sky. Someone’s calling from far away. A single drop of tears coming from your eyes makes you realize that you’re still alive. You’re an addict who kissed the past but got trapped. You’re a skull with no present or future; you cry like a little child. In the very last minutes when you thought no one could save you, you saved yourself because you’re the only one who holds the key to changing your life.

A new and bright ‘you’ has seen the light of the day because you’ve finally realized that the past is not all of your life but only a precious part. Your curiosity made you realize that when you swim, you could also discover the beauty of the ocean. The past cannot be ignored. Yes!  It cannot be because it allows you to benefit from your own mistakes and failures. It also helps you realize how obliged you are to live in the present, ‘to be the son of now’, to free yourself from seeing only the dark side. Failure is not the end; ‘failure is a feedback’; it’s a sign that shows you’re going on the straight and right path; it means that you want to go all the way to find yourself because you ‘could not define who you are from yesterday’s mistakes’! It’s a day and night struggle to impress yourself by your perseverant soul so you can proudly say that it’s only the start of a successful and fruitful journey.

To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child because you give yourself no opportunity to accept your failures, enrich your mind, and improve yourself for the better. The tears you shed become the rain that’ll water your path, and the pain you bear becomes the strength that’ll push you to keep on. The more painful you are, the more experience you gain. The past gives way to the present, and in order to blossom you have to ‘face it and rise rather than forget it and run’.

The past cannot be hated because that’s where the climax of it all is. It is the hallmark of your success and your destiny. Before it’s too late, it opens new roads for you and makes you know how to live properly and correctly. It is a drug so you have to know how to use it for your own benefit!