Yesterday I wrote about white blood cells and what the world might look like if people acted more like them. There is another aspect to the human body that helps us learn from our experiences and remember our past injuries. It is the scar.
Many of us have them. Some are internal, some are external. All serve as a reminder of a time, an experience, a lesson, but to what end? Wouldn’t it be better if we could forget all together the pain of the injury? If our body could be restored completely?
With any change, one of the greatest tools of learning is repetition. But who wants to repeat a fall, cut, or worse? The reminder serves as a way for us to recount the learning experience without repeating the actual experience.
And just so we don’t think all this only works in the negative; keepsakes, photographs, and souvenirs function in the same way for positive experiences. They are reminders and take us back to the feeling we had in that moment.
Either way, it’s true to say many of us require reminders. Maybe then there is a work in the remembering. Lest we forget the good and the bad.