Suppose you had no memory, you might think that would be great. But it would be a total disaster. Your past is what preserves your identity. Without memory, you would awaken each day without the knowledge of yesterday; every person would be a stranger. You couldn’t build and grow in marriage. Friendships and all the wisdom you gained from the past would be gone. Each day would be like starting all over again.
We know that we are living in the now. But we must have in our minds the memory of the past, to understand what the now means. If we had no memory of the past, we would only have the emptiness of today.
I heard of a man who had a calendar on his wall, which had only one day for each page. At the end of each day, he would tear off the page and throw it away. Then he realized that his calendar was getting thinner each day. So, he changed his practice, and instead of throwing each page of the day away, he decided to start a pile of the days, so as his calendar got thinner, the pile of the days he had lived got thicker. True with life. Yes, you can look back with regrets and guilts, but if you merely throw away the past, life for you gets thinner and thinner. Learn from the past. Let the past be your teacher and the future be your friend.
I want to encourage you to download my series called “Moving Life Forward.”
