In TV play ‘Samantha Who?’ Christina Applegate, enacts the role of a complicated character that wakes up one day from a coma, not knowing a thing about her past. In one stroke, she is able to erase a life’s record of triumphs and transgressions. Instead of handicapping her, this ‘ever-fresh slate’ gives the heroine the freedom to rewrite her life’s scripts in all sorts of tragic-comic ways that might have been impossible with the burden of past karma weighing down heavily on her.

Samantha is like the monk without care in the famous Zen story of two monks and a geisha: one carries the lady cheerfully across a stream and forgets all about her. The other, only silently watched the woman being hauled across, is still carrying her in his mind so weighed down is his conscience with hyped up impropriety and ‘secret longings’ that he may have harboured for the beautiful woman.

Most people, who are non-amnesiacs, belong to the latter category. For them the past is not only not dead, it is not even past. “Indeed, the past lives on in everything we think, feel, say, and do.”

Nor does the past sit there passively like an obedient child, adds psychotherapist Dr. Harold Bloomfield, waiting to be summoned when we want to remember things. Instead, the past is a ‘full participant’ in our lives, sometimes calling for the confidence, generosity, and exuberance, and at other times unexplained anxiety, despair, and even physical illness. The remedy to that lies not in amnesia, but in creative closure: that calls for the realisation that while hurt may have been inevitable, suffering is always optional.