Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not to “remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, p. 239. Emphasis in original.
Add that to TM’s curious comment to me one day: “you can change the past.” That puzzled me. How can you change the fact that World War II happened? It sounds absurd until you realize that the past doesn’t exist—only your memories of the past exist. And you can change your memories, or at least your interpretation of your memories.
Memories are incomplete, vague, maybe ill-ordered in my head. Maybe an inconsequential event is vividly remembered and a deeply important event deliberately forgotten. It never existed, as far as my memory is concerned.
Elsewhere in this chapter, the author talks of listening and describes Freud’s process. It is exactly what EL did. And EL told me what he was doing, as he was doing it. He would say “I don’t know what the right answer is for you. But you do. I just let you talk until you discover the right answer that you already have inside you.”
EL was allowing me to reorder my memories and create an answer, an order, from them. He listened. That was what he did. Then I knew what to do in the present.
Sometimes he was explicit with feedback, because I didn’t know how to think very well. This is me at age 33, for God’s sake.
Remember the time when I wanted to rent an apartment and there were two available? One was available now (and cheaper, and had a fridge). The other one was available in two weeks. I didn’t know what to do. It seems comical in retrospect, yet there I was. One graduate degree and part-way to a second, and I couldn’t make simple choices.
“Take the apartment that is available now” was his direct response to my confusion. There was a meta-lesson in that simple sentence, quite apart from solving a dilemma in the moment.