remember this
When things fall apart, when I face disappointment in my life, I notice my tendency to lose touch with my own memories. Instead of a source of comfort, they become a source of pain—when I can remember things at all! It’s almost as if I have developed a kind of immune-deficiency toward them: as though my mind becomes allergic to my own past. (oh, I say, I cannot think about that…let’s move on! But as I move on, I notice I get lonelier—for myself and all the beloved others of the past.)
This is not pleasant—ahem! Not at all. And I have been puzzling about it, beating myself up about it, off and on, for years. Now psycholanalysis tells us that of course, the present utterly colors the past—that we revise our memories constantly. That we have a deep need to line up the past so that it creates a seamless linkage with the present we are now in. The phrase: “we are now in” is important from a Buddhist point of view, because it points out how all things change. That even the past, which common sense might tell us is gone and fixed forever—we all know you “can’t go home again”, or “you can’t have a re-do”—actually is also relative. And seen as the Big Picture, metaphysics of the dharma, that is true: co-arising, impermanence, emptiness: they all teach us of the relative interrelatedness of all phenomena. This changes, that changes. Inevitably.
But I had another thought, based, as all my most interesting thoughts these days have been, on my new Theravada Insight practice of the breath. What if there is actually some reality to these “unpleasant” memories? What if they exist because I was living my life fiercely clinging to my suffering, embedded in my style of life, repeating patterns of anger, greed and ignorance? Then the real insight is this: Try not to do that NOW. Try to live the day with less suffering involved for myself and others. Try to create better future memories. This is useful because it gives me something to focus on now, in my life, to do now to participate in “change” and not simply to be its passive witness.
