Blog 1530 – 11.26.2019

Someday We’ll Know Love Can Remove A Mountain

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Someday We’ll Know

Pardon me, Mandy, for my Mockingbird version of your lovely song, and for taking the lyric in a different direction in this blog. Someday we’ll know just as surely as we are known. There are certain questions that seem to haunt us all of our lives. We all live with regrets regarding things we might wish we had done or over things that we did and might wish we had not. Sometimes the hardest lesson of all to learn is just to let go. Often we cling to people, relationships, and beliefs that make us neither healthier, happier, wealthier, nor wiser but drag us down to the depths of despair. Some great advice I learned while trying to be a Christian was, “Let Go And Let God.” Many Christians like the rest of us often do not accomplish that very well either.

The movie, “A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood” that I blogged about seeing on Sunday surprised me as it was less a story about the incomparable Mister Fred Rogers and more a story about his friend Lloyd Vogel learning how to forgive his dad for leaving him and his brother as boys when their mother was dying an agonizing death. I can hear some of you thinking out load, “How could any man, worth a shit, do that or any loving son ever forgive such a terrible offense against his mother?” In a dream of his mother you hear her saying to Lloyd, “You are holding on to that hate for me. I do not want or need you too.” Often some of the hardest offenses to look past or get over are those offenses we carry like love badges of honor for others. Only ego wins these foolish wars, hating always hurts the hater worse even than the hated. Just let it go, loose from yourself that anchor and chains and they will drop like dead weights into the sea of forgetfulness.

I know you have heard people say and probably said yourself, “I can forgive him/her but I will never forget.” Can you really do the one without doing the other? I don’t think so. Let it go, it is the only way to free the other person and yourself from a hurtful memory that like a red burning scar will forever remind you of the hurt, the hate, the offense. But I cannot forget, you say. Of course you can, and do, all the time – where you left those damned keys, or that stupid cell phone, or those nose hurting glasses, oh that’s right, ouch, they are still my face. Forgetting is a lot less work than remembering. Let it go. Can’t sleep? Please, just let it go.

Perhaps it is not as important that we know. Perhaps it is more important to just let go so something better can come. Try this little exercise the next time you are about to pull your hair out trying to remember the actor who played Lex Luther in the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve. He has played in hundreds of movies, you can see his face as plain as day but just cannot put a name to it. His name is Gene Hackman, of course, but you cannot recall it to save your life. Calm yourself down. Let it go. When you quit trying to remember it will pop-up into your consciousness. It works the same trying to forget. Just let it go and it will fade away, to haunt you no more. Troubling people and problems stay in our lives because we cling to them. It used to be common practice to put on cemetery memorials, grave stones, “Rest In Peace.” At some point even the dearly departed, too, want us to just let go.

Someday we’ll know, but first we have to let go. It is a law, we must make room in our hands, hearts, and minds to receive the brighter, better, best life has to offer.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White