Seneca, Session 2, Part 2: Breaking Free of the Past
The person who holds grievances as treasures keeps them stewing in their mind.
When our minds are focused on those who transgress against us, we see our life experience through a veil. Unheeded are basic lessons our experience can teach us.
Seneca encouraged tolerance of others while constantly striving for self-improvement. He recognized the human tendency to blame others rather than deal with troublesome issues themselves. Long ago, Seneca cautioned against reacting impulsively out of righteous anger. As we continue to learn of the harmful effects of anger on ourselves and others, we realize that much is at stake.
Recently, Bill Clinton told of living in a state of rage for two years after his wife lost the 2016 presidential election. He was angry at James Comey, then director of the FBI, and others.
As I've argued in previous essays and in my recent work on David Hume, we must constantly revisit grievances to keep them fresh in our minds.
Think how often you draw on the past and project the past into the present and future. We are sure our memory-based projections are accurate. But what we are really doing is pinning our internal state of mind onto others.
Carrying grievances is like going through the day, dragging a bag of rocks, and then wondering why we are stooped over, dispirited, and exhausted.
Dragging a bag of grievances can be so habitual that when somebody suggests that we drop the rocks, we wonder, what rocks?
We are certain we are responding appropriately to life's challenges. But what if our memories are inaccurate?
In an essay in The Atlantic, Memory Lane Has a Three-Way Fork, Ed Yong reports on findings by neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge. Yong writes, “We’re very used to thinking of our memory as a kind of storage vault, where bits of information are recorded and filed away for later perusal. But it’s not like that at all.”