Apropos of a lot of stuff going on these days and over the recent past, I've been re-reminding myself of familiar material.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, verse 51 (trans. by Edward FitzGerald)

These lines get quoted all the time. Lots of posters have been printed and whatnot. The words are widely known, frequently quoted with approval, and just about universally ignored.

It's a sad sentiment, I guess. It's true enough on the face of it, and quoted often enough, that it could be dismissed as a platitude. But that would be a mistake, I think. It talks about a place of acceptance that's maybe easy to understand (sort of) and real in a quite direct way. It's one of those plain truths that need elaboration, if at all, only in their effects, but not in the reasons behind them.

The question, upon encountering something that real, is "OK, what do I do about it?" One possibility is to get all sad, as noted, when confronted with the inescapable reality that mistakes just live forever. Accidents, stupid acts, even intentional meanness are just out there in history -- or in memory at least, even if the story doesn't get told. That's a lot of weight to carry through life, and it continues accumulating with every single decision. Every act is one more thing we can't take back.

So the appropriate response is maybe to sit there doing nothing. That's maybe the one action capable of preventing addition of some new mistake to the load. 

I've been thinking of another possible response -- not in place of the sadness, maybe, but complementary to it. Seems to me like the Khayyam quote could be read as a way to step into the future without carrying that whole load. The past can't be changed, only regretted or celebrated or some combination. Fully realizing that could be a way to free up the mental cycles occupied by the moralizing for reconsidering the future instead. If you can't wash away a word of the past or cancel half a line, then life begins fresh with each choice. It can be a zen statement of perpetual new beginnings.

Not that lessons should not/could not be learned. Reading the writing on the wall is one way to learn from the instructions. And I don't mean to minimize the weight of things that happened that will continue to have their effects, emotional and otherwise. I do mean to notice, courtesy of Khayyam, that  I can't rewrite any of that, and my best available option is to greet new decisons as well as I can.