Mark Ulyseas – Can we say good bye and forget?

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Can we say good bye and forget? by Mark Ulyseas 

How convenient it would be to say good bye and forget, walk away and continue living. Abandoning all that sustained or agitated us in the past. Everything. Everyone.

But is this possible? Apparently many people have attempted this but have fallen prey  to the demon of remembrances that is perched like a gargoyle on our shoulders ready to  devour our present thoughts and to wake  us up to the past with glimpses, some bad, some good and some dreadful.

Perhaps we unknowingly cross the prime meridian of the present and the past so often that we frequently find ourselves marooned in a memory that is of our own making.

Many among us want to say good bye, want to forget but how can we do this? And is this possible?

Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything – love, convictions, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”

And is this millimetre that Kundera speaks about a momentary lapse of concentration that strikes us during times of ennui? When the meaning of living loses its lustre and truth becomes the bastard child of reality, an unwanted addition to our book of life; and the past becomes a refuge?

How many times have we experienced that feeling, the feeling of suddenly being detached from people around, muted by the past that appears in a flash like a shooting star? Images of the past invade our senses. It is usually a colour, a sound or a smell that triggers the teleportation. Despondency or exhilaration overcomes us. And then it is gone. Sadly for some of us we board the shooting star and carry on into the darkness of space. The journey back takes the rest of our life.

It appears that saying goodbye to all that and forgetting is not an option.

We are tenants of the here and now living in the mine field of the past. And every once in a while one of us loses a life to the past.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om

© Mark Ulyseas
December 15, 2014

 

One Reply to “Mark Ulyseas – Can we say good bye and forget?”

  1. Pingback: Can we say good bye and forget? – markulyseas - My Telegraph

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