Human beings intuitively divide time into the past, the present, and the future. We perceive the past as immutable and fixed, the present as reflecting actuality, and the future as undefined and nebulous. As time passes, the moment that was once was part of the present becomes part of the past; and a moment of the heretofore previously unrealized future arrives and becomes the new present. The past is a record, the present is real, and the future is an imaginary thought.

The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.

The negative feelings of anger, bitterness, guilt, regret, resentment, and sadness represent a failure of a person to accept that the past is an event that holds no power over the present. The thought that the future will bring salvation is an illusion. We must exist in the present.

We live in the present with knowledge that the past is alive in us – our history speaks to us. The future represents an idea or expectations that influence our present state of mind.

An understanding of the cultural history of our homeland together with an intimate familiarity with our community’s customs injects richness into our lives. Awareness of our ancestors’ home life and their true-life encounters with poverty, deprivations, tragedy, and fleeting successes connects us to the phlogistic hiss of the past and awakens us to the possibility of future transformations in how we live.

Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.