Everyday Ethics: A formula to guide you through life

PM=PP+PF.

It’s a formula I use to reflect on my life or that of the society in which I live.

Here’s what the initials mean. PM is the Present Moment. PP is the Push of the Past. PF is the Pull of the Future.

The formula is based on the notion that the present is shaped by what went before and the aspirations of what might be.

Most of us don’t realize the impact the past has on us or why our hopes or fears for our futures impact us now. But understanding this formula helps us gain perspective and some control over how we live.

When I apply the formula to my life now, I look at the events and people in my past who still influence me today, whether for good or ill, and ask why. Most often the family in which I grew up is the most dominant influence. Then I think ahead to where I want to be headed and ask myself if I am heading in the right direction. This kind of exercise seems unique to our nature, being the thinking animals we claim to be.

Lately I have used this formula to examine where our society seems to be in the present moment, based on the push from our history and the pull of where people seem to want to be.

Our present moment certainly seems chaotic and confused. A pandemic hit but we have no national policy to deal with it. We are told the Coronavirus will simply go away but by others it will get worse.

We find our country withdrawing from the world even as the world enters anyway. We appear divided politically, geographically and racially.

How can the formula help us understand our current predicament?

First, we are pushed by the past. While we speak often of Thomas Jefferson’s words about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we realize that when the words were written women could not vote and slavery had been around for nearly four hundred years.

Some of our founders knew slavery was a contradiction but put the issue on hold for future generations. One civil war nearly a hundred years later was part of this unfinished business.

Even then, it was unfinished, as segregation took over in some states and even after civil rights movement, economic and racial injustices remained.

But the pull of the future is breaking into our midst today around the vision of a more inclusive, multi-racial and ethnic society. This vision is an aspirational one about the kind of future we want our children to inhabit, not ones measured by our divisions bur rather by our shared vision of a more perfect union.

We cannot go down the highway to the future looking only in the rearview mirror. Nor can we speed down the road unsure of where we are heading.

The present moment requires us to learn from the past but aspire toward a better future. That’s why we are here, as individuals and as a society.

John C. Morgan is a writer and teacher whose columns appear regularly.