Our skiing past is analogous to a snowball that grows as it moves downward and picks up more snow on its way. However, it does not collect all the snow, but rather a portion of it. The same happens with certain events from our skiing past, which we ‘carry’ to the present, and become bigger and bigger.
According to St. Augustine, in order for time to exist, it must cease to be the present and transit into the past. However, it can be challenging to eradicate the past itself. As we grow older, we tend to become overwhelmed with time, i.e., with past skiing experiences, instead of being fully present in the present moment.
We carry with us a skiing past that was often not fully resolved at the time and that returns to us in the present. Instead of confronting it with positive attitudes, we often react as the negative emotions experienced during those opportunities resurface.
According to Freudian theory, an event in our past is stored in the unconscious and can lead to neurotic behavior at some point in the present. Rendering the conditioning theory proposed by Frederic Skinner, our present actions are attributed to our past conditioning.
However, Sartre denies this assertion, stating that the being-in-itself, which is the reality prior to any intervention, is separated from the past by a “nothingness“. While there are certain facts in our skiing past that we cannot modify, such as facticity, according to the sartrean conception, nothing from our past can condition what we ski in the present since we can always reinvent ourselves.
Although our skiing past is unmodifiable, it continues to operate in our present. When we ski, we are governed by the past through feelings, which are how we construct our thoughts about the present environment and ourselves as skiers. Our past time is not just a reminiscence, but an influence that generates patterns of behavior in our skiing present.
We tend to repeat these patterns as we are thinking about our skiing past and the situation we were in, and bringing them into our present is the cause of their repetition. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, skiing can be comprehended from a retrospective perspective; however, it must be experienced from a forward perspective.
