This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
I’ve been studying the Greek language for over two years. It started, as with all novices, with the alphabet, numbers, and the pleasantries of small talk—all the rehearsed civility of strangers. From there came the unforgiving discipline of present and past tenses, and the endless architecture of genders, cases, and mutating verbs that come with it.
A few weeks ago, I asked my tutor when we were going to cover the future tense—not least because I love hypothesising and speaking about the future. In response, she said,
“Before we know the future, we must first master the past. Once we learn the past and its patterns, the future will make more sense.”
In Greek, this is very true on a grammatical level. The future is, indeed, a hell of a lot easier to learn when you know how the past works. But it’s true in a way that far surpasses the grammatical realm.
There’s a book called The Fourth Turning, built on the premise that history repeats itself in 80-year cycles, comprised of four 20-25-year “turnings”.
These ”turnings” consist of:
- High: An era of institutional strength and social conformity.
- Awakening: A period of spiritual, social, and cultural rebellion.
- Unravelling: A time of weakened institutions and increased individualism.
- Crisis: A period of total institutional change, where society must rebuild, similar to the Great Depression/WWII.
In this sense, it pays to learn about the past—what happened, when, and why— because you can start to notice the recurrence of things: the same tensions, the same errors, the same uneasy resolutions, playing out on a global scale. Patterns emerge, whether you welcome them or not.
And there is, it must be said, a cost to this awareness. The same knowledge that sharpens your sense of what may come can just as easily induce the suspicion that very little of it is within your control. If that leaves you with a sense of unease, then I’m right with you, my comrade.
But the good news is that there’s a remedy to that. And that brings me to the next realm that my tutor’s insight took me to. And that’s the personal one.
What holds at the level of nations and cycles also holds, with fewer excuses, at the level of the individual. If we look backwards, into our own past, we too can notice patterns. Behavioural patterns, thought patterns—patterns that have, over time, created our characters, and in many ways, the small worlds we’ve built for ourselves (for better and worse).
Any failures and flaws we find, if repeated over time, tend to suggest more than just circumstance. They point, often with uncomfortable accuracy, to habits and thoughts we’ve unconsciously carried forward. They’re rarely accidental, and we can predict with great certainty that they’ll keep happening.
The difference is, while we may hold no influence on the cycles of life that happen on a global scale—and while history may well repeat itself whether we like it or not—we do hold influence over our daily actions, our immediate environment, and community. History doesn’t have to repeat itself here.
If we don’t like something about ourselves—if our present or future depends on it—we can break the pattern. And there’s a lot of comfort to be found with that. That at any given moment, on any unremarkable day, we can learn from our past, and change the course of our futures, moving forward as a better version of ourselves.
And should we ever push to move into a future with any level of entitlement or ignorance, I have a lovely Greek tutor who’ll kindly remind us of a past that’s not yet mastered.
