Remembering--and Forgetting

In Hamlet, Shakespeare penned the provocative sentence: “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” We make many things for ourselves besides our faces. We make choices. We make decisions. We make memories, and bit-by-bit, thought-by-thought, deed-by-deed, we become the evidence of what we are and no man need write our record. It is written within us.

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

Usually memory is useful. We expect it to be. If it weren’t, we surely wouldn’t spend the years of time and effort in learning, in storing away information, later to be remembered and 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 should remember: that the same process, which records what we want to remember, also records what we would rather forget. This points up 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 privilege of repentance, and with it, peace and quiet thoughts can come, even after a bad beginning—if honestly we have the strength and desire to turnabout sincerely and 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.