How Selective Memory Shapes Lives
Who is happier? The one who can’t remember or the one who can’t forget? The answer is, “both”, but only if we apply each strategy effectively.
I began my last piece on memory—Bliss is in the Forgetting—with the quote “ignorance is bliss”. I should start this one with another:
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Like Einstein, Gandhi gets a lot of credit for brilliant witticisms… that he never authored. With regard to the quote above, what Gandhi did say—in 1913—is as follows:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
The passage is beautiful. Just apparently not pithy enough for a meme.
What Gandhi was pointing out is that the world is a reflection of our internal state: not of facts, but of perceptions. In other words, if we see a hostile world we feel is out to get us, then that’s exactly…
