Put your behind in your past

It’s a strange day when Pumbaa, the Disney warthog, and Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, arrive on the same page to make the same point. And yet, here we are.

Let me explain: I’ve been rereading Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in connection with a book project. Many people read this short volume as a death-camp memoir that emphasizes virtue and the power of meaning-making. But Frankl saw Man’s Search as something closer to field notes—a clinical, and moral, analysis of human behavior under unimaginable, perhaps unprecedented, psychological and physical load.

I’ve read the book before. This time, though, what struck me between the eyes was not the horror of the camps, but Frankl’s trenchant discussion of the surpassing utility of the past. And that’s where Frankl and Pumbaa converge—if not in history or even species, then in philosophy—in a way that only seems accidental.

In Disney’s 1994 animated hit The Lion King, Pumbaa and Timon, a kind-hearted warthog and a wise-cracking meerkat (who somehow imported a Borscht Belt–era comic cadence to the African savanna), provide comic relief. They also stage a quiet contest between rival ways of coping with pain.

Not long after the film’s opening tragedy—the death of Mufasa, lion king of the Pride Lands—Timon and Pumbaa find Mufasa’s son, Simba, still a cub, collapsed on a parched mud flat in despair and exhaustion. After deciding Simba poses no threat, they quickly discover he is running from something heavy and unnamed: shame.

Eager to help, Pumbaa jumps in: “You gotta put your behind in your past!”

“No, no, no!” Timon says dismissively. “Amateur. Lie down before you hurt yourself.”

Yet Timon never corrects Pumbaa’s comic mouth-mangle, never says aloud the familiar bromide: You gotta put your past behind you. Instead, the outcast pair break into the catchy little time-compressing montage song—and disastrous life philosophy—“Hakuna Matata.”

But Timon’s failure to repair Pumbaa’s apparent error leaves open a narrative possibility: Is Pumbaa just a lovable oaf given to the occasional gaffe—or is he quietly wise?

Viktor Frankl would say the latter. He saw the past as a vault, a storehouse of life’s treasures. “The only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities,” Frankl wrote, “but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, where they are rescued and preserved.”

Usually, Frankl observed, man overlooks “the full granaries of the past.” Popular American psychology often does the same. Don’t live in the past. Let it go. Live in the moment. By and large, we are trained to treat sustained engagement with what came before as either irrelevant or evidence of pathology.

But a people unconnected to a conserved, coherent past—a usable past consonant with the way humans actually behave, for good or for ill—must constantly manufacture meaning in real time. When the past is treated as disposable or suspect, the present bears an impossible load. Identity becomes improvisational. Norms become negotiable. Reality itself begins to feel optional.

The modern impulse to sever ourselves from the past is also profoundly unscriptural. Both Old and New Testament writers were deeply concerned with preserving and rehearsing lineage and tradition. They spent a surprising amount of time remembering not only good times and good people, but bad times and bad actors as well.

Connecting with our pasts, individually and collectively, conserves shared culture, codifies wisdom, and remembers family heroes as well as those whose lives serve as cautionary tales. The past is where we secure our deeds, our joys, our loves, and yes—our sufferings, seasons that often confer wisdom and new strength. And here’s the irony: Even as pop psychology urges us to let go of it, the past is the one place meaning can’t be taken from us.

In transforming potentialities into realities—doing the work God has given us to do and securing it in the past—we who live in Christ defy life’s apparent ephemerality. I say apparent because life is decidedly not ephemeral. As we shed our earthly tents, life does not end; it changes form. In this life, we stack stones of remembrance as monuments to God. In the next, we come face to face with Life itself and, stone by stone, give an accounting. In this view, the past isn’t something to be avoided but employed and embraced.

I don’t often take advice from cartoon warthogs, but in this case I think Pumbaa was right: We should all put our behinds in our pasts.