The time is ripe for looking back over
the day, the week, the year, and
trying to figure out where we have
come from and where we are going to,
for sifting through the things we have
done and the things we have left
undone for a clue to who we are and
who, for better or worse, we are
becoming. But again and again we
avoid the long thoughts….We cling to
the present out of wariness of the
past. And why not, after all? We get
confused. We need such escape as we
can find. But there is a deeper need
yet, I think, and that is the need—not
all the time, surely, but from time to
time—to enter that still room within
us all where the past lives on as a part
of the present, where the dead are
alive again, where we are most alive
ourselves to turnings and to where our
journeys have brought us. The name
of the room is Remember—the room
where with patience, with charity,
with quietness of heart, we remember
consciously to remember the lives we
have lived.