spring cleaning III

There was an amazing essay in the Styles section of the NY Times yesterday about how Alzheimer's disease had, in some way, healed the writer's grandmother and family. (A Memory Magically Interrupted by Robert Leleux) As the grandmother's Alzheimer's progressed, her overall health improved. The doctor explained that people with Alzheimer's often heal themselves of their physical diseases because they forget they have them. Moreover, as her memory faded, the grandmother became happier and kinder. From the article:

Imagine: to be freed from your memory, to have every awful thing that ever happened to you wiped away - and not just your past, but your worries about the future, too. Because with no sense of time or memory, past and future cease to exist, along with all sense of loss and regret. Not to mention grudges and hurt feelings, arguments and embarrassments. And that's the fantasy, isn't it? To be able not to merely forget, but to expunge your unhappy childhood, or unrequited love, or rocky marriage from your memory. To start over again.

We can't expunge the experiences -- they happened. But we can change how we look at them and the way we feel about them. For example - people in a yoga class find out that their usual teacher isn't teaching that day -- there is a last minute sub. Most of the people are ambivalent. Some are excited to experience someone new. And some are really upset and disappointed that the teacher they expected is not there. One or two actually feel betrayed and angry. The experience -- coming to a class, having a different teacher -- is the same but the way people feel about it is different. Where are the feelings coming from? Not from the class, not from the original teacher or the sub. The feelings come from the individuals.

Your world is coming from you, not at you. So if you don't like your world, change it. Take this season of rebirth and renewal to change how you think about your past. Think about the valuable lessons you learned from difficult experiences. View them as blessings instead of wounds. We shouldn't need to wipe out our memories to be happy.