Here’s the thing: we can’t live our lives by forgetting. All we can do is transform our past experiences into something else. And that’s what we should do, turning them into memories that won’t weigh on our hearts or drag us down into misery. While it may be true that stories of suffering cannot be transformed into wondrous tales in the way that coal becomes diamonds, if we go on living in spite of them, we ourselves can become something else, like a treasure chest, or an oyster containing a huge pearl.
