THE philosopher Alan Watts, who helped introduce the world to the Beat Generation and wrote the multi-million bestseller The Way of Zen, had a very useful word for coming to terms with and letting go of things from the past.

He called it ‘forgettery’: “If you always, and always, and always remembered everything, you see, you would be like a piece of paper which had been painted over, and painted over and painted over, until there was no space left and you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between one thing and another.”

I can see an argument for ‘forgettery’.

Too often we hold on to memories which actually become a barrier to moving on with our thinking and analysis of what is going on around us.

So much of a barrier, in fact, that we become trapped in and by the past. Unable to let go. Unable to move on.

Unable to accept that the world we see, through the prism of unreleased memories, is a world that fewer and fewer people recognise.

And, in not recognising it, see us as relics from the past who aren’t allowing them to move on.

As we know all too well, in Northern Ireland, tens of thousands of people still live with the debilitating physical and psychological memories of our troubled past.

Tens upon tens of thousands more live with the memories of family, friends........

© The Irish News