The primacy of youthful manners and behavior, even among people who are already grown up, is one of the unmistakable features of today's socioculture. Hence the exaltation of instantaneity, a typical characteristic of adolescence: to rush ardently and carefree today, disconnecting it from the rest of existence. From this attitude derive these hackneyed platitudes: "I don't regret anything"; "simple experiences"; "you learn from everything"; "I have evolved"... Perhaps the most representative of all is to remake my life...

Phrases that are usually heard after sad experiences: disappointments, frustrations, failures, disloyalties, disillusions... They have in common the desire to annul or suppress the past, as if it had never happened! They represent, without more than that, an adolescent rage, even if they are pronounced with pretended sincerity, and they are psychologically unsustainable, at least for two reasons:

First. Adolescent psychology judges instants as unconnected, independent entities. Big mistake! Life is unique, unrepeatable and irreversible. What is done..., remains done: and its echo reverberates, incessantly, in history staff. Inexorable law. The tiny instants of existence are intertwined, weaving life in a continuous flow between past, present and future. 

Second. Human actions -even the most thoughtful ones- are always accompanied by an emotional imprint. This trace is stored in the report or wanders in the imagination. Therefore, the acts are also stored in core topic affective, with more or less consciousness, with more or less intensity. The real event and the emotion it aroused remain.

Resting on an affective sediment, memories can present themselves or awaken outside of rational cadences or voluntary decisions. They surface unexpectedly and inadvertently, by surprise, with little room for self-control; often like carrion flies around painful resonances. And this clattering of the past overwhelms or stuns, weighs like an affective ballast. 

The passionate adolescent immaturity is exasperated by this echo and they flee from it like a scalded cat. They ardently longed to satisfy the desire of the moment, but without accepting the consequences of their actions. However, reality is rocky and stubborn, and this shock exasperates them. To escape, they improvise picturesque mechanisms of escape: to make a tabula rasa with the past; to look for scapegoats to anesthetize their own responsibility; to plunge into the external bustle to soundproof their conscience; to rush the present pleasure as revenge or compensation for the affective recharge of the past; to think exclusively about today, without projecting it in the future...

In a society with adolescent, immature tastes, these escape mechanisms take root, engendering lives without purpose, with the only purpose to flee forward madly, hiding behind an explosion of freedom. However, the facts remain chiseled in the biography, as common sense dictates. Therefore, the mature attitude is to accept the past with scrupulous realism. Accept what has happened, and its aftermath, with responsibility staff; even those events or situations in which we have been run over or become victims. That is how it was, that is how it happened..., with it, and from there, we have to build our happiness...

In a healthy and normal personality the rumor of the past resounds, intermittently, in the intimacy, and exerts a balanced influence in its acts and present decisions. However, once assumed, it is advisable not to poke too much, not to handle it any more: to put it to sleep..., because at some point we may need to wake it up.

And what about the laughing pasts, which obviously do exist? There are luminous and stimulating pasts, which sponge the spirit and generate the desire to live. In spite of it, to those we also have to apply the previous criteria. The imagination tends to keep the events in an ideal scenario, without accompanying them with the edges of reality. And this idealized memory generates a psychic climate of certain disillusionment or disenchantment.

At final, whatever the meaning and sign of the past, the basic attitude towards happiness consists in clinging to the present moment, with its gurgle of joys and sorrows, roughness and hopes...: normal life! The humus of happiness is the present.

It always hinders to look back with nostalgia or bitterness, because it ties or huddles the spirit, and disfigures the present as revenge for old frustrations or nostalgia for better times. Cling, responsibly, to today: "If you cry for the sun at night, you will never see the stars" (Tagore). So it is, enjoy...: the beauty of dark skies, where it is not known if there are more stars than night or more night than stars; the enchantment of the usual under the glow of the moon; the enigmatic of the shadow among the shadows... And the immensity of the night horizon that tempers and soothes the spirit.

Although the night, flirtatious, hides a tempting treat: it dawns again! But it never dawns yesterday, it always dawns today... And today is a time to get drunk on life. Enjoying life requires accepting the past in order to project the future from today, an attitude that Seneca reasoned as follows: "Even after a bad [good] harvest we must sow again"....