Double in ourselves?

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."
- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

I sometimes find it hard to follow Emerson's advice above. It is a simple thing, really, to treat each day in isolation from the "... blunders and absurdities" that we daily commit. Even as we assume the past has no physical reality, still it plays on our mind through memory and experience. We draw on things past to help us do and understand things in the present; for example, how to read, or ride a bicycle, or the route we take to work. We remember that drinking tea can often be a pleasurable experience, or that eating certain foods almost always leads to unpleasant moments on the toilet (or what folks at my old university used to call them, "Wismer-shits").

So perhaps there is some value in drawing on the past for the sake of the present. Yet sometimes the past infects a mind with images that render it helpless or severely morose in the present. We see our follies, berating ourselves rather than drawing lessons from them. We take an activity with potential utility--looking backward for ideas about the present--and instead make it an exercise in fashioning negative ideas about ourselves. Our "old nonsense," as Emerson puts it, does nothing more than supplement the new nonsense we daily produce. It would seem that one day's follies are enough; why add to them with those we have already carried?

And so I think Montaigne gives reasonable advice, maybe;echoing that of Shakespeare-through-Hamlet, and no doubt others. Our thinking makes us sick or well, in a mental sort of way. That at its root, we do not need protection from the past, but rather from the mind that uses the past to assail our present. We are double, as Montaigne says elsewhere, in ourselves. Our mind makes us well, and our mind makes us ill.

Maybe.