By admin 
Years ago, I watched a documentary about a young man who had suffered from meningitis.
It came suddenly, without warning. At first, the doctors in a small hospital did not recognize what was happening. Eventually, he was transferred to another hospital, where the diagnosis was made.
He survived.
This was extraordinary…but his survival came at an enormous cost.
His past was completely gone.
Not metaphorically. Not because he had decided to “live in the present.” He had lost all his memories. He had to learn his own name again. He didn’t recognize anyone….not his parents, his family or his friends. He had to relearn ordinary things we never even think about knowing. What is a spoon for? What do you do with a toothbrush?
His parents, family, friends, and even his former school teachers began the enormous task of introducing him to the world again.
This is food. This is how you eat it. This is a house. This is cold. This is warm. This is what we call rain.
It must have been exhausting…..but they were all determined to help him.
In some ways, he had become like a child again… and like a child, he entered the age of “Why?”
Children have that wonderful, slightly maddening period in which almost every answer produces another question.
Why is the sky blue?… Why does this hurt?… Why do we have to sleep?
Why are bananas curved? 
You answer carefully, feeling rather pleased with yourself, and immediately comes: “But why?”
Eventually, even the wisest parent reaches the ancient philosophical conclusion:
Because it just is! 
What touched me in the documentary was a question he asked his former geography teacher. Looking at a map, he asked:
“What are all those lines on the map?”
“They are borders,” he answered.
Then came the second question:
“Why are there borders?”
And suddenly the easy lesson became a difficult question.
Why are there borders?
Of course, there are historical and practical answers. Nations, governments, wars, treaties, cultures, administration, territory. We can explain how borders came into existence and why societies use them.
But perhaps the interesting thing was that he still asked the question.
And perhaps that is where his story becomes much more than a story about memory loss. Because it reveals something about the rest of us. We may remember everything. But perhaps that is precisely why we sometimes stop seeing.
Perhaps that is the quiet question his story leaves behind:
How much of what I experience today am I actually experiencing now, and how much of it has already been decided by yesterday?
“I don’t like this….I know what kind of person he is…..I could never do that.”…This is simply how the world works.”
We rarely experience these as memories. They feel like facts.
Maybe we don’t need to lose our past to rediscover something of that openness.
We can remember who we were without insisting that we still are. We can know what a flower is and still really look at it. We can know that the lines on a map are called borders and still dare to ask why they are there.
Perhaps the past is not the problem. Perhaps the problem is that we so rarely notice when the past has already answered the question before the present has had a chance to speak.
So maybe, every now and then, we could look at something familiar..a person, a belief, ourselves, even the wind, and become a little curious again.
What is this, if for one moment I don’t already know?
And then simply see what is left.
With love and light,
G.