Always as I near home this question comes to me. It’s a question of course that I’ve thought much on over the years. It’s a question to which I’ve also given an answer on numerous occasions. A most unsatisfactory answer, I must construe, from the fact that … Well, here I am at home again and now it appears that this is the only question not covered in pink fluff that everyone awaits …

Why to forgive but not to forget? Are you not a Christian Mitch? No I am most definitely not a Christian, but I don’t see what bearing this has on my desire to learn from my mistakes. Christians don’t have a monopoly on forgiveness. They do however appear to be able to forget better than those of other spiritual creeds. Though I suspect – hell, I know it to be true – that they forget only the things they wish to forget, or rather those things that they wish others to forget.

Imagine if we forgot that there was a man-eating crocodile in that lovely pond over there, imagine if we forgot that the last time we came across that particular dog it raced right round the back of us and bit us on the leg, imagine if we forgot that the last time we trusted such and such a person they deceived us and caused much pain and ill health to us .. imagine these small things and think of how they affect the quality of forgiveness. Imagine an engineer forgetting the parameters required to build a safe bridge and just guessing .. and hoping that they will be ok.

So forgetting is not a smart thing to do. Forgetting means that not only will it be possible for one to repeat the mistakes of ones past endlessly but in some circumstances that forgotten thing may cause harm to others too – unnecessarily.

It appears today in our neoliberal miracle world that forgetting is given a much higher value than the act of forgiving.

For instance our King is always trying to tell us that we need to ‘move on, get over it etc’ … Really this is nothing more than an excuse for not having an answer or being afraid to give an answer or an invitation to repetitive forgetfulness. The king deceives himself and his god in his attempt to deceive the greater mass of the people.

It’s nonsensical to be expected to forget a harm that it is possible to forgive. It is right that forgiveness soothes the soul and this is an extremely powerful tool for a healing process, but the forgetting of either what or who caused the harm is idiotic. It does not aid the process of healing. Not forgetting aids the process in that it serves as a warning that though you have forgiven – for instance the dog that sneaks up behind and bites you – the fact that you can remember that this dog will do it everytime, prevents the injury from reoccurring and means that you can deal with the dog on level terms each time you meet it.

It is good not to forget .. and, Yes, it is very good to be able to forgive but it has to be remembered that the quality of the forgiveness is dependent on that which you don’t forget.

“If your ambition is to maximise short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost, If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never really to understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge.”