My Tuesday posts have turned into kind of an eclectic collection of ramblings – a bit of art, food, travel, philosophizing…

This week I finished one of the best novels I have read in a long time. Anthoney Doerr first captured our attention with “All the Light You Cannot See.” His most recent book is “Cloud Cockcoo Land,” and it is amazing – I highly recommend it.

One of the characters, Omeir, makes an observation to himself toward the end of the book that has stuck with me:

“Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.” P539

My first thought was “I thought we were supposed to learn from the past.” But then I realized that most any type of learning involves some level of pain, certainly not healing.

Memories are the cause of so much of our pain, that I know. Then I remembered something that Zig Ziglar said: “The only thing worse than a bad memory is a perfect memory.” When we revisit our mistakes, hurts, and failures, long after they happened, we rarely learn, instead we reopen the wound, usually adding a good dose of guilt with it.

My thoughts then went to how this connects with forgiveness, of ourselves and of others. There is a famous litany of what love looks like: Love is…

• Patient
• Kind
• Not envious of others
• Not boastful
• Not arrogant
• Not rude
• Not insisting on its own way
• Keeps no record of wrongs
• Protects
• Trusts
• Always hopes
• Never gives up

It struck me that each item in this list is either concerning how to act in the present, or looking toward the future, except one. The only reference to the past is to forget the wrongs. Would that be the wrongs I have done, and the wrongs done to me?

Of course the hardest person for most of us to forgive, is ourselves, yet without forgiveness healing never happens. Maybe Omeir has it right, we need a bit of forgetting.