A few days ago, I came across a phrase by Friedrich Nietzsche that left me upset: "Blessed are those who forget, they win the battle against their mistakes." I didn't make sense of it. For me, it is important to remember and learn from memory.
However, when I sat down to write this column, I thought about how many people would want to forget someone they used to love.
Then, I remembered one of my favorite movies: 'Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind', a drama about an ex-partner who decides to undergo an innovative treatment to erase the memories of their stormy relationship.
In doing so, they forget their entire life together including the medical procedure they underwent. But they retain the feeling of having lost something important. They feel confused, cry constantly, and end up convincing themselves that something is wrong with them.
This story, even if it is fiction, shows the real, deep fear generated by having to face our own feelings and go through the necessary, albeit painful, processes for our personal evolution.
It also makes us think, why is the need to deceive ourselves and evade reality so great, in order not to face anguish or loss, and how justified is trying to avoid pain?
The French philosopher, Blas Pascal, affirmed that "not having been able to avoid death, misery, ignorance, human beings agreed to be happy not thinking about it."
In his opinion, we are not very akin to introspection. On the contrary, we seek to flee from reflection and meditation because we find it confronting. However, perhaps acknowledging our emotions is the only real way forward.
Also, if we erased our memory, would we still be the same? The philosopher René Descartes also argued that the mind of the person is his own self. That is, knowing what we know gives us identity. We are what we think, remember, live.
At the same time, this film, Shakira's latest song, close and personal experiences, always make me wonder the same thing: How is it that human beings go from loving someone to hating them, to the point of wanting to completely eradicate them from our lives? ?
The English thinker John Locke said that our ideas of love and hate are dispositions of the mind in relation to pleasure and pain. Therefore, people hate what causes us pain, and instinct leads us to avoid what we hate. But even that is not forever.
Finally, what we observe in the characters in the film is that, by trying to evade pain, the suffering becomes greater and greater as it escapes their control, it becomes something powerful but without roots, without a source, a kind of unexplained misery.
For this reason, from this column we insist: we must go to meet what we want to say goodbye to, look it in the eye, treat it, heal it.
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