Remembering--and Forgetting

In Hamlet, Shakespeare penned this provocative sentence: “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” God also gave us in our entrance into this life, a new start for the making of memories, and as we make our memories, we ourselves become the evidence of what we are, and no man need write our record.

Many things we might have thought were long forgotten have proved to be persistent, stored away, only waiting to be recalled. We never know when something will start a chain reaction of ideas that will bring back some memory from the far past. We never know when something will recall a long-forgotten impression of the past.

Usually memory is useful. We expect it to be⎯and if we didn’t feel that we could count on it, we surely wouldn’t spend the years of time and effort in learning, in storing away information, later to be put to some useful purpose. Sometimes it takes a little brushing up, a little freshening of memory to recall what we have once learned, but once having learned something, we expect to be able to bring it back.

And this also we would well remember: that the same process which records what we would want to remember, also records what we would perhaps rather forget. This emphasizes the importance of the making of memories, of the thoughts we think, of what we choose to give our attention to, of what we permit to be stored in our minds.

We ourselves are our own written record, and if we have written some things wrong, there is still the blessed privilege of repentance, and with it, peace and quiet thoughts can come, even after a bad beginning⎯if we have the strength and courage and desire to turn about and sincerely improve our performance. But if we want the kind of memories that are good to remember, we had better live and do and think the things that make that kind of memories.