English has multiple ways to express the past, with the simple past being the most common. It can describe actions of limited duration, finite periods, past habits, and ongoing states. The past is never truly over, as it shapes our present and future.
Every language has a way in which events that happened in the past can be expressed, but not all languages have a marked past. English has several ways to talk about something that has happened and is over or that has happened and is still happening. The most common way to do this is with the simple past, also called the preterite. The simple past is usually formed by adding the suffix ed to a verb, although there are many irregular verbs that form this tense in various ways.
A brief meditation on the nature of things past should make it very clear that the past is seldom as truly past as the term might make it sound. The simple past is used to describe a wealth of ways in which things have occurred that are no longer present. The cleaner past names something that began and ended in a limited time, which has absolutely nothing to do with the present. For example, “Yesterday I went on a bicycle ride” tells a listener about an action of limited duration. It almost seems like this kind of past exists in a sealed world away from the present.
A less sharply delineated but still clearly past application of the past tense is when it is used to describe something that lasted for a somewhat unclear but clearly finite period of time. For example, if Aunt Dottie said, “For several years as a child, I believed that animals spoke to me,” it stands to reason that she has either come to her senses or lost her weird ability of hers. Again, that kind of past seems to exist exclusively in the past.
An even more clouded past is however evoked by the same form of the past tense. Something that used to be habitual, that happened repeatedly, often or frequently, but now no longer occurs, is expressed in the past simple. Here, the unspoken addition of used to come to the statement seems to whisper: “I’ve always wondered if I’d be a famous dancer, but I’m 73 and it hasn’t happened yet.”
This tense can also be used to describe an ongoing state of being rather than an action. Perhaps this is the least clear-cut way of using the past simple of all because there really isn’t a precise time when a state begins or ends. It’s simple, and then it just isn’t. The example: “I was a slender child; I was so skinny that people were constantly giving me cookies and cakes,” this concept demonstrates. Sometimes, the simplicity of this kind of past is a state we all wish we could return to, but we are anchored in the present and clumsy in the future, which will transform present moments into the substance of a simple past.
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