It’s time to let go. It might be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you might become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.*
(Jordan Peterson)

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.**

Oaths, peace and reconciliation, acts of oblivion: Lewis Hyde lists how humans have acted through history in order to forget the things that would otherwise torment them.

We don’t have to be religious to appreciate what the psalmist is grappling with. More than ever, we know both our smallness in the vastness of space and the potential uniqueness of our consciousness.

Together, these make us creatures of wonder rather than celebrities.

We can be terrible rememberers, though, living half-lives both for ourselves and for the good of others, and yet we live in a universe that allows us each day to forget what has been and to explore through remembering what we can be.

We do not wander into this kind of forgetfulness, the existence of oaths, peace and reconciliation and acts of oblivion make it clear how difficult it can be to forget – something we may have to choose each day – but it is not impossible, and a world of remembering waits to open before us.

*From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life;
**Psalm 8:3-5.