day no. 15,826: when we forget the future and pass over the past

"The good things of life — truth, justice, beauty — all great accomplishments need time, constancy and 'memory,' or they degenerate. Those who feel neither responsibility toward the past nor desire to shape the future are those who 'forgets' and I do not know how one can really get at such people and bring them to their senses.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Good things are cultivated and curated over time. It requires consistent remembering in small faithfulness over long amounts of time. Without effort, we forget. Without taking heed, we drift away.

Hebrews 2:1

Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. 

Those who refuse to take heed of the past or to take hold of the future live entirely in the moment and for the moment and like a moment evaporate in a flash. They are timeless in the same way that wanderers are homeless in that they belong to no time. But not because they are eternal. That would be to belong to all times. But a homeless man does not belong to all homes. He hangs his hat in none of them. Neither do those who forget the future and pass over the past belong to any time. Not because they're boundlessly eternal, but because they are so insistingly temporal.

"A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants." -- Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay.