The Past: personal view

A thought just came to me that the past cannot effect me because it isn't even presently efficacious enough to literally come back to me. Past certainly necessitate what happens later but the past is not present within the events that it necessitates. Rather it is our memory of the past that is presently efficacious to our emotions, thoughts, opinions, and reasons. It isn't the past that disturbs us but rather our memories of them. This is not to say that past is not real but rather when we often think about our past we do not always make a distinction between our memories and the past. With the past we do not have control over, it is beyond our reach. But with memories we might have control over how it effects us but not entirely it's existence. We can fool ourselves into thinking that we can deliberately and easily eliminate our memories but our memories will stick with us unless our brain is damaged. While our memories are there it does not follow that they must always effect us unless one of us has post-traumatic disorder (sorry, can't control that either). What we can do is learn to manage our own feelings associated with the memories by letting go of the feelings by accepting and understanding our memories which changes the emotions. This allows the mind to focus on the present activities rather than the past.