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Footsteps in the Sand

01 June 1988

I was walking with someone I had known for 18 years, but I had never really become his friend. That someone was my father.

By MOHAN BHAGWANDAS
The waves lapped at our feet as we walked along the sea-shore not far from my home in Sri Lanka. The sun dipped into the horizon, casting into the heavens the brilliant hues of a tropical sunset. I was walking with someone I had known for 18 years, but I had never really become his friend. That someone was my father.

That walk along the beach has left an indelible mark on my mind, for a new relationship was born between us. It is a memory I can recall instantly. I see it in my mind's eye like a replay on a video screen. It is one of my happy memories, the thought of which lifts me at times of doubt and difficulty.

There are other memories, of course - equally vivid. I can recall them instantly too. They generate a variety of feelings: sadness, despair, resentment, affection, emptiness, love....

I find that events and incidents in the present can touch something in my memory storage system. They can trigger off a response or reaction that I would not normally show. So much of what is going on in my conscious mind is unwittingly stored in memory. A conversation, a person, a scene, a song or even a smell can recall experiences of the past and produce a surge of feeling within me. Memories, I realize, are linked intimately with feelings. This memory/feelings factor seems to touch not just individuals, determining our personal behaviour patterns, but also whole communities and nations.

There is a collective memory bank to which we all have access as people of a nation, race, tribe or community. One individual's memory can be used to mobilize thousands in a common cause. I met a man whose uncle had been burnt alive in Sri Lanka. A trained lawyer, he joined the guerrilla fighters in a struggle against the injustices that he experienced and remembered. He became part of a mass movement of people sharing the same feelings.

Pegs in the storehouse
Paul Tournier refers to 'the individual symbolism, which forms part of a universal symbolism, which springs from the collective conciousness of the human race'. In his book A Place For You he writes, 'All our experiences, emotions and feelings are indissolubly linked in our memories with places. Man is not a pure spirit and he has part in the places in which he has lived and experienced joy or sadness. He is bound up with matter, with things, with the ground he lives on.

'Our place is our link with the world. All the places we have lived in remain with us, like the pegs in a vast storehouse, on which our memories are hung. They symbolize all the states of mind through which we have lived, with all their varied shades of feeling.... Places of singing and places of crying, places of hurt and places of consolation -we preserve them all within us.'
Is there a key here to our individual and collective behaviour? Is the young Palestinian in the Gaza strip, the Irishman in Belfast, the Tamil in Jaffna or the Sikh in Punjab crying out for an acknowledgement of this fact? `We are fighting for our homeland' is a cry that rallies support in crisis situations around the world. People give their lives daily for it.

Can memories be healed and soothed? Can individual and collective recollections find 'their place' within the soul of the human race? Will memories of the past linger, from generation to generation to haunt the children of the future?

That walk along the sea-shore with my father helped me to rewrite my memories. Like the cool breeze off the ocean, painful recollections were blown away and I was reconciled with myself, with him and with God. Since then so many other memories have been triggered in my mind, revealing empty spaces left frozen in time. And an inner voice has spoken to me, releasing me from the bondage of the past. Often it has been a painful release, facing the cost of how I have deeply hurt others, especially those whom I treasure most.

We may not see a world full of people with happy memories. There is too much suffering for that to happen. Yet there is a power that can liberate us from the captivity of yesterday.