Remember all that was forgotten … or at least consciously reconcile what you can reconstruct about what happened with others. As I launch this new version of a digital business card, almost 10 years removed from its inception and 5 years from its suspension, I have heard myself repeating this phrase to people around me, “I don’t forgive and forget—I remember and reconcile.”
What could I possibly mean? I mean accountability through community reparations rather than individual escapist exceptionalism about how the rules don’t apply to me in this circumstance or another. If I forget what you or we have done, then my forgiveness is complicity, not just between us, but for the community that sees our example as a permission structure allowing us just this once to sneak into the cookie jar.
No. A community remembers. We remember our actions and its impacts in our history, our family stories, and the inside jokes. I doubt forgetting actually happens, but repression does. And repression demands false narratives that imprison truths of our experiences within elisions of our felt social exchanges. Instead of rich detail, we are left with a smoothed contour that erases the nooks and crannies previously interpenetrating the social ecology of our lived, shared conditions. We gain moral simplicity and lose depth of context.
And a community that remembers can reconcile. We take concrete actions to learn from our mistakes and encode new behaviors that limit the predictable consequences of forgetfulness and enabling forgiveness. A reconciled community is a strong one that knows its history and seeks to expand its narrative to include one and all of us. A community history has no winners and losers—it is but a document of remembrances and reconciliations.
It takes a village to lift each of us up. I want to live in a village that remembers who I am, holds me accountable, and invites me to imagine what we might become when we remember all that we really have been and could be, to borrow from the words of my Mom, Sara Leeland, now tattooed, in her memory (Rest-in-Power), on my arm.
It is my hope that this little digital flicker becomes a node in the ever expanding historical structural understanding of our shared global paths, past, present, and future. We have all the information we need to be the people we have been waiting for all this time—what we need, I think, is a dynamic and curious discourse that raises the bar of what we can expect each other to show up for and handle. We are more amazing than we give each other credit for and more fragile than another of us wish to admit. I feel we are at the time when we need to slow down, share, and care. We need integration, regulation, and coherence in community. Our individual well-being depends on good social medicine. Ubuntu, in a word.