the art of remembering

We can’t stop remembering, that’s part of the human condition. The picture captures a "ghost bike" placed to remember a cyclist's road death.
The passing of time might move some on, but it neither diminishes the pain nor eradicates the event.
Memory plays a huge part in our formation and as much of our recall is community or family based, it passes through a number of analytical social filters before it becomes received or accepted history. Memory does, however, play tricks and as time moves on, some facts and elements of the past fade. This is a normal process and neither means we are creating a past nor reinterpreting history to our own ends.
So we need to accept we are formed by our own memory as well as the remembering of others, even our “enemies”. Memory is not a linear process and as John Paul Lederach reminds us, we constantly move between the past and the present and through this create new memories which transcend the years.  

“Every act of memory contains imagination and every act of imagination an embedded memory.   We find it hard to live with the ambiguity formed by the murky windows we all peer through, which we assume are accurate and clear.  They are not.  We peer into past, present and future through a glass lit dimly."

So my challenge is for me to remember that although our histories are entwined, how we experienced them and how we recall them are different. In that difference should be found the space to share and discuss our different experiences recognizing in that place, our common humanity.