How many times have you heard people advise others to let go of the past? Once you see that these painful, traumatic experiences are over and done, and you stop “holding on” to them, you supposedly achieve “closure” and can “get on with your life.”

If you’re like me, you’ve heard this kind of stuff a lot.

Not recognizing that the past is over and done with is supposed to be bad for your mental health, and a troubling failure to embrace the reality that life is lived in the here-and-now. In mental health professions, this notion is often taken as gospel. But I think that there’s something terribly wrong with it. I think that trying to let go of your past experiences, however painful they are, is like trying to discard part of your body. If you succeeded, it would diminish you rather than making you more whole. And it’s something that you can’t possibly succeed at doing anyway.

要知道为什么，我们需要转向哲学的一个分支，叫做“形而上学”，它处理现实的最基本组成部分。形而上学家指出，这个世界充满了各种特殊的东西——不只是像桌子和椅子这样的无生命的物体，还有人。每一个特定的事物都在某个时间进入世界，存在一段时间，然后停止。人在被构思后的某个时刻诞生，过着自己的生活，然后消失在遗忘中。

The period between coming into the world and departing from it is the period of time when a personpersists. One of the topics that metaphysicians are interested in, and that they theorize about, is the nature of persistence. They ask what exactly is it for an object—or a person—to persist through time.

Many people think that we travel through time, moving from the past to the future. Looked at in this way, persistence is like driving on a long highway from one place to another, departing before birth and arriving at the destination at the instant of death. According to this view, thewholeof you travels—persists—through time. You undergo many changes before you reach the finish line. You grow, you develop, and you have all sorts of experiences, both good and bad, before you die. These experiences are ephemeral. They exist only fleetingly, in the thin moment of the present. And they cease to exist when they pass, preserved only in memory, if preserved at all.

Philosophers call this picture of persistenceendurantism.The idea that the past is dead and gone fits right into the endurantist framework because, for endurantists, past experiences no longer exist. We’ve gone through them and have come out the other side. Life is in the here-and-now, not the there-and-then.

但耐力并不是唯一的选择。There’s another way to understand persistence that’s calledperdurantism.Perdurantism can sound weird, because it’s further removed from common sense assumptions thanendurantism is, and it takes a bit more explanation to make clear. Start by thinking about your own body. Your body is composed of parts. You have hands, feet, head, and the rest, all distributed in space. Now think about your life. Your life is composed of parts too, but they’re not distributed in space like your body parts are. They’re distributed in time. These time-parts never消失，因为所有这些都造就了现在的你。两岁的你，和十二岁的你。20岁的你仍然是你的一部分。正确理解这一点很重要。

Perdurantists don’t claim that you are theeffectof your past experiences. They say something more radical: you justarethe totality of these experiences. Think of a brick wall. The wall isn’t aneffectof the bricks that make it. Instead, it’s the sum of those bricks. According to perdurantism, a similar relation holds between the sum of your experiences and the person that you are. You are the sum of your temporal parts.

Endurantists say that the whole of you travels down time’s highway, leaving the past behind and heading into the future. But perdurantism presents a very different picture. You don’t travel through time. Instead, you accumulate more and more temporal parts. You are the highway, not the car. Your first temporal part was the moment that you came into existence, and your last one will be the moment before you pass away. None of these disappear. As long as you live, they are there, making you the person that you are.

所以，从坚持不懈者的角度来看，放弃过去的想法比胡说八道更糟糕。你的过去是你的一部分，并将一直是你的一部分，直到你死去。试着放下过去的一部分，不管它有多痛苦，就像试图截肢自己的腿，然后扔进垃圾桶。这更没有意义，因为摆脱身体的一部分是可能的，但摆脱生活的一部分是不可能的。

So, how about taking perdurantism seriously? And instead of trying to convince yourself that the past is over and done, why not work at forming a good relationship with that temporal part of yourself that gives you so much pain? Instead of trying, fruitlessly and hopelessly, to consign your past experiences to the garbage can of history, why not value them, cherish them, and learn from them instead?If perdurantism is right, your past is you. Embrace it.

Photo byDiego JimenezonUnsplash