Life as it exists in the present is the incarnate embodiment of present attitude, present choice, present experiences, and present interpretation. While it might be tempting to think of one's present existence as simply the culmination of prior experiences, the understanding of such a reverse-looking explanation occurs in the present. In other words, interpretation of the past always occurs in the present. And depending upon present context -- emotional, intellectual, spiritual, situational -- details from the past move in and out of focal awareness. For this reason, it is easier for us to recall memories that reflect our present situation. A person who is depressed right now, for example, will interpret their history differently than when they are filled with joy and excitement.
Life is its own reward
Each person is ultimately responsible for the state of affairs in their own life. While some might be tempted to remove themselves from personal responsibility through blaming their parents, their childhood, their environment, their failed relationships, their friends, their religious leaders, their social status, their economic status, their abusive boyfriend, and so forth ad nauseum, the choice to abdicate themselves from personal responsibility is still a personal choice. Stated another manner: choosing not to choose is still a choice. While we cannot control the facticities of existence, such as our DNA structure, the physiology of our brains, the color of our hair or eyes, we can choose the manner that such facticities are interpreted.
We cannot choose the cards that have been dealt to us -- however, we can choose our reaction to those cards. "Life is its own reward" means that a life will reflect the choices made during the course of that life, whether for bliss or woe, for good or bad, for pain or pleasure. Life follows choice.
I write this to not remove hope but to give it; for life up until this point has been filled with sorrow, depression, sadness, anger, or anxiety. And up until now, these darknesses of the human condition have taken hostage one's innate openness to possibility. Said in another manner, pain and suffering constrict an individual's openness to being to the point where existence itself becomes an expression of pain and suffering. And here too, life is its own reward, for rather than choosing to fight the choice to "give in" to this darkness has been made. Plants cannot grow in dark closets.
Yet at the same time, the difference between following all that has come before and exploring what is to come rests in a different perspective. We can say something like, "My life up until this point has been filled with pain and suffering, and the life I live now in the present is like scar tissue around my heart preventing me from feeling. There is no hope because the course of my life has been set, and I have been predestined to fail." Life is its own reward. We can also say something like, "Despite my past, I choose to have a different future -- a future of my own making. I am not the simple result of added events from the past; the "me" in the here-and-now is the "me" in the future."
It goes something like this. Imagine the ideal version of yourself. This ideal self is the person that you wish to become -- and it is the person who you are not ... yet. This future version of yourself can be achieved only through successive approximations in the present, but the goal is the guide. You are who you envision yourself to be, and in here, life is its own reward. That which you treasure will be reflected in the life you live.
Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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