I just came across a great quote from Terry Pratchett on YouTube:
“There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.”
Wow. That’s a sentence with real weight. It sounds simple, but it’s quietly profound. After I read that, I had to sit with it for awhile. Let’s dig in.
If you think about it, what is the past? It’s not a thing that exists anywhere. It’s not around the corner. It’s not down the street. It’s not in the town next door. It’s not sitting in a vault waiting to be revisited. It’s just an echo in your head, an afterimage your brain calls up when you need to make sense of where you are. It’s a fiction — a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it was true, but it isn’t anymore; and probably the version of your past in your head doesn’t match what actually happened anyway. The only thing that’s real is this moment unfolding right now.
Zen teachers have been saying this for centuries. But Pratchett sneaks it in through a side door: not with koans or riddles, but with a practical trick for the mind.
Our brains love regret. They chew on it like an old bone. “If only I’d done this… if only I hadn’t said that…” But regret is a strange sort of delusion: it’s like yelling at a TV character for making the wrong choice. You can’t change what’s already aired; the episode is over.
What you can do, though, is change how the next episode is written.
That’s the beauty of Pratchett’s framing. It’s a mental hack that lets you slip past regret without fighting it. Instead of telling yourself, “Don’t dwell on the past,” which never works, you redirect your focus: What can I do right now so that when I look back later, this moment becomes part of a past I’ll actually like remembering?
It’s not quite the same as mindfulness — it’s a trick to get to mindfulness. A way of fooling your time-obsessed brain into living in the present moment by dangling a little bait from the future.
We can’t change what’s already happened. But we can change what “happened next.” And someday, when that becomes the past, maybe it will be one worth keeping.
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |