RememberAndAppreciate

This page was inspired most recently by reading about ahimsa in NonViolence. RememberAndAppreciate could be seen as a component of ahimsa, a perspective that permeates one’s approach. This perspective casts the context through which one moves in such a way that one is guided to right action.

Whether one has a HardSecurity record in place or not (whether through the work outright of a RecordKeeper, through more quotidian grudge holding, or simply through the structure of what was once created), the past is always with us, as is the future. We move across the surface of time using points all about us--past, present, and future--as navigational beacons.

Obscuring the details of those beacons does not help us. Knowing the qualities of those beacons, however, can help us, whatever those qualities are. Perhaps we become deceived when we view a beacon from a certain angle, and therefore stumble or run aground, but the same beacon viewed from a different angle provides indispensible help. Narrow essentialism “this beacon is deceptive” removes the one benefit for the sake of avoiding the one pitfall.

The only way in which we fail to find value in examples from the past are when we do not fully comprehend the lessons they hold for us. If we do have a clear view of those examples, then there is no essential danger to them and no need to discard them. Discarding something before we have learned all we can from it, isn’t that wasteful?

It could be that discarding the past becomes a filter. Here the past loses its essential qualities to guide us and takes on the qualities projected by the filter itself. Who among us sees the past so clearly that we can guarantee we do not impose such a projection? Discarding the past isn’t the only recontextualization that the past can undergo, though it is certainly one of the easier ones.

ForgiveAndForget holds past events to be a burden. RememberAndAppreciate cast the past in a different light. The distinction between the two is one of perspective--as with viewing both images in a figure-to-ground reversal, the ability to see the past as a source of instruction and thankfulness, rather than a burden to escape, requires a shift that cannot necessarily be explicated. Even so, because the CommunityExpectation is for explication, here is an attempt.

Another immediate inspiration for this page was one going to a page and wanting to know who said what in the creation of the page. Now, our goal is to live in the wikinow and to disssuadereptuation, but the use of signatures and the insistence on UseRealNames on thesewikis is ubiquitous and persistent and work strongly against depersonalizing the content. So, in the face of such direct interjections of personality, the NonViolent approach would be to seek out those things we appreciate in others’ work. When we find work that pleases us rather than enrages or disappoints or saddens us or makes us afraid, don’t we want to know who it came from? Is hiding the contributions of the past a way to go about BarnRaising? Should, instead, we seek to memorialize those who made things possible by allowing them to engrave their names onto the cornerstones of the edifices we seek to construct together?

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