Let It Go

It's been a good Christmas. Perhaps not a day I'll remember forever - it was fairly uneventful - but I'm convinced that we forget many of our best times. The things we look back on and laugh about and memorialize in story were usually not very nice at the time, even (occasionally) downright nasty. That's understandable; conflict produces tension and drama and all that stuff we love in a tale. But times of peace, quiet happiness and refreshment (which we seldom recall and almost never recount) provide us with the fuel to keep on muscling through the rest of life. Maybe remembering them is not necessary - they've done all their work already; there is no reason for them to remain. We recall our mistakes (too often, sometimes) to learn from them, but what can we learn from peace? Retrospectively, very little. Some things are not designed to be learned from so much as accepted. That's a hard truth to swallow for ever curious Mankind but we'd better try, because if this is not grasped we'll find ourselves plucking apart flowers to find out what makes them beautiful. The desire to hold things in our hands forever, to be masters of everything we experience, to know why everything exists and how it works, must be reined in. The part of us that we call our mind (our reason and will) cannot file everything away neatly in drawers and label each with its uses. To attempt to do so is not only an exercise in futility; it will also irrevocably damage many of the items we most treasure. It's as foolish as trying to keep a river, because you can feel it flowing away. Leave it. Let it go. Forget, secure in the knowlege that some part of you will keep it forever.