You forget what you want to remember.
You remember what you want to forget.
See, memory is an illusion – it’s all gone – so everything you know about, that makes an impression on you, is no longer there. That memory has got you hooked – it holds you to the past, and it holds you to death. But on the other hand, what is life, except there is a memory, except there is an echo. So, the course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean. It leaves behind it a wave, and that tells us where the ship has been, in just the same way as the past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. Now the important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wave doesn’t drive the ship. So you see, if you insist on being determined by the past, that’s your game. But the fact of the matter is: it all starts right now.
-Alan Watts