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How to be Free of the Past (no matter how near or how distant)
What We Bring With Us…
I’m re-reading Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson and I paused when I got to this quote,
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama.
‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.’
I love this. It echoes what I see to be true — that the past isn’t something in past time, it’s what we bring with us, what we live into, what we recall and experience, in the present moment.
What is Memory?
Mostly we call those things memories, and we use the word as if that memory is a fixed thing — we are remembering something in the same way that we might look at an historical artefact — there is a reality to the object, the place or the person and we are looking at something we have brought with us from a previous encounter.
What if it doesn’t quite work like that?
What if the memory is more like coming across a box of photographs taken by impartial (or partial!) observers? Like a friend’s wedding I attended where she asked people to take pictures and post them on a…
