A Past Worth Having
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. |
Great post. 👍
Reminds me of the meme that says when people time-travel to the past, they're always worried about making a tiny change that would alter their present, but people never seem to think about the fact that a tiny change in the present can alter their future.
I LOVE Pratchett. I just finished The Last Continent and am starting The Truth now. 💛💛
My favorite quote of his is from Making Money:
"'Good heavens, potatoes are worth more than gold!’ ‘Surely not!’ ‘If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag of potatoes or a bag of gold?’ ‘Yes, but a desert island isn’t Ankh-Morpork!’ ‘And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right? It’s just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. A knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you’ve got a meal, anywhere. Bury gold in the ground and you’ll be worrying about thieves for ever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent.'"
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Wow, that's also a great passage! Pratchett was so good, always working in great quotes and passages. He's one of the few who was consistently great.
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There's no point in clinging to the past. Everything is a great learning experience, and what's done is done. With everything we've learned, we can make new choices starting today and try to avoid the mistakes we made in the past.
Exactly!
It's definitely a better framework to work on changing the past. I think the stories we do tell ourselves always influence how we act in one way or another. Changing these stories isn't that hard, especially when we download the right catalyst like this wonderful quote above!
I agree!
So powerful 💪. There are people who dwell so much in the past, letting that affect their presents. I will reblog this post to pay recourse back to it again.
Thanks!
That is a powerful quote. This is a great way to frame my thinking when regrets come to mind. Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for reading!
Excellent insight. Regrets keep chewing away at me, time after time. I'm going to reread this quote so I can keep it in mind every time one pops its way into my head. Thanks dbooster!
Every time I come across a powerful quote like this, I write it in a small notebook that I can review every now and then.
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Interesting read. On the other side, you may not know the future consequences of an action. You could think you are taking the right action now, but it becomes the wrong one in the future.
What works for me is never to look back in regret. I did all I could.