Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 36

How realistic is the advice to “forget the past?” Selective amnesia is virtually impossible and I am not convinced—even if we could forget—that it would help much. All our past, for better and worse, got us here. You have to dance, as legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal put it, “with what brung ya.”

Charles Dickens, whose past was very painful, at age forty eight went behind his Gad’s Hill house with two of his young sons and burned, basketful after basketful, all his private letters. He threw on the bonfire every letter from friends and family—words historians and journalists, then and now, would die for. Dickens wished to be judged on his literature, not on his personal life. He did not want to worry about an unguarded word, privately committed to paper in the heat of the moment years earlier coming back to be held against him or his family.22

Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his book Teacher Man with a blanket pardon of those who helped make his childhood in Ireland miserable. He singles out Pope Pius XII, “the English in general and King George VI in particular,” bullying schoolmasters who hit him regularly with a stick, his alcoholic father, and assorted others.23 Let us hope that trumpeting his forgiveness to the world helped him forgive at a deeper level.

Each of us decides how to deal with past emotional pain. One person I know wrote her five worst memories on a paper towel and flushed it. There may be some power in ritualizing a resolution so that we do not allow traumatic events to dominate our lives.

Alice Roosevelt Longfellow advised: “Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.” Any time is the right time to burn up coddled grudges and dated emotions, or flush them, and move on.