Looking Back — Looking Forward
Many of us have different cultural backgrounds. Maybe
we grew up aware that our traditional family foods looked
different from our neighbors’ foods. A case in point: I did
not grow up eating fish. My Italian friends might be shocked
to know that I can’t even name seven kinds of fish, not to
mention that I have never had a “Feast of the Seven Fishes”
Christmas Eve meal. (I'd try it now, though!)
We know that foods, languages and those kinds of traditions can vary widely, but we assume that some things are the same. Basic things like, say, time. Don’t we? And yet…
The Maori culture of New Zealand (like the Aymara of the Andes) understands the time designations of past and future very differently from how we understand time here in the U.S. Just as we do, the Maori speak of time in terms of physical metaphors: in front of us or behind us. But that’s where the similarity ends.
We in the U.S. imagine the metaphor of past as something behind us. We say “looking back” as a synonym for remembering. Likewise, we speak of planning for the future as “looking forward” and the future as something ahead of us. If we take the master metaphor for “time” as “us walking down a path,” this makes sense. We see where we are going as we walk, not where we have been.
For the Maori, though, the future is not like a path that already exists. It doesn’t yet exist, so we can’t see it, except in our imagination. But the past exists! We can see it. It accompanies us into the future and equips us for it. Our resources for the future come from our culture, our history, our relationships.
The Maori might ask, “Does it make sense to face what exists, or emptiness?” The Maori like to keep their eye on what they are bringing with them, not on the void. Some Maori even pity the rest of us, always gazing into what doesn’t exist, turning our back on the richness of community, ancestry, and culture. To the Maori, the future is lonely—because nothing is there yet!