Through my life I have had friends from all different walks of life and levels of wealth. Personally I have never been wealthy in the sense of money however I have always been given a wealth of knowledge from my family and the people I surround myself with.
I have spent time with people who are often seen as a hindrance to society such a gypsies and convicts along with spending time with people who's parents own hedge funds and seemingly have everything you could ask for in life along with all types of people between these two things.
One major thing I have learnt form these experiences is that a person is just a person, no matter what someone looks like, acts like or is portrayed to be they are still simply a person. That I think is the first and major key into understanding why things in this world happen.
Good and Bad:
We are often taught from a very young age that something is either good or bad, which in my opinion is a very damaging way to teach people as it gives a warped perspective on reality. Good and Bad are really know more than concepts that we as humans created to mostly maintain order, from saying this I mean that something we are told is good in another culture may be taught as bad.
For example in the western world you are taught in school and in many homes that a good job is a high paying job and that you should aim to do well in school so that you can get a good job and make lots of money.
Then in more spiritual areas of the east a more common teaching will be that only striving to gain money and physical assets is bad and only services your ego, rather than this you should strive to open your mind spiritually and find the deeper meanings of life.
In this situation how do you say what is good and what is bad because both are simply different perspectives of living your life, outside the simplicity of good and bad.
Across the majority of the world the worst thing you can do, the most heinous crime, is murder. Killing another or multiple other people. I'm sure most of you reading will agree murder is inherently bad. However if you tried to travel to a place called North Sentinel Island the likely hood is that you will be murdered by the tribe that live there, they will see this as a good thing to do, kill someone.
An extreme example however I use these examples to say that good and bad are not black and white but rather a matter of individual perspective. This I think is the second major key into understand why things happen in the world, perspective.
The Past:
My original question, Is the past ever bad? Things that happen in the past may be mainly perceived as bad so the consensus is that said act was bad. So an act is negative but I think even with a negative the end result can be positive. For example when I was a child my dad left and was not heard of again for around 10 years, most people would see that as bad however I see at as good. From that I learnt a great deal about myself and other people. I learn't I can get through issues I never thought I could overcome and I learn't that people can become overwhelmed, scared or a whole variation of feelings causing them to do something that may be seen as bad.
Although the thing that happened is bad the results of it are good, all the people involved in the situation I mentioned learned a lot about themselves and about other peoples perspectives allowing them to deal with future situations in a way perceived as good.
So to answer myself I think the past can be bad however from every bad situation you can always find good to take out of it. You can always take a lot of good from bad situations. It is hard to quantify the amount of good and bad created from a situation, however if something bad causes a huge amount of good does the good cancel out the bad. I would say they don't cancel each other our however if you accept both good and bad learning from both and not dwelling on the bad it makes what happened worth the bad.
I would also say that perspective is everything and I will delve deeper into that subject later.