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Reminiscing about pleasant memories is normal, even healthy, but living in the past can be unhealthy.

Culture affects whether we live our lives on “clock time” or “relational time.”

Working on our long-range future should not overshadow our short-term future.

Where do you live in the continuum of time? Do you think a lot about future plans, vacations to come, future events, weddings, graduations, promotions, and so forth? Or are you at a place or moment in your life when you think more often of the past, things that happened, events that were good or not so good?

In Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, the renowned humanistic psychologist Joseph Rychlak (1928-2013) acknowledged that reminiscing about pleasant memories is normal and sometimes can even be psychologically helpful. However, he noted that most psychologists agree that living in the past is unhealthy. Rychlak believed that the essential nature of people was looking to the future, that “we always create ourselves by arranging future circumstances or allowing them to arrange us.”

How our relationship with time unfolds depends in part........

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