Leaving the past where it belongs

Moving on has never been easy however in order to live a healthy and happy life, the best road to take is that with no regrets or wounding memories of the past.Erasing the memories usually takes sometime. It might even seem impossible to forget the things that hurt you in the past, however having fresh memories as if it happened yesterday, shouldn’t hold you back or keep you with a thirst for vengeance. Now that the 18th commemoration period of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is here, feelings of remorse, recollections of the genocide and all those ugly memories are re-birthed.However, as we remember the loved ones we lost during the genocide, we shouldn’t be compelled by the pain to seek revenge or try to stir fresh wrangles in a bid to pay back for the lives lost in 1994. Nonciata Nyirabera, a genocide survivor, says that the best thing to do is to move on and forgive the people that hurt you and focus on a brighter future.She lost a number of relatives during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and still sees the relatives of the perpetrators who destroyed the lives of her people around. “The last things I can do are hate or try to bring back the battles of the past. If we don’t forgive and move on, then we will always live in conflict and quarrel. Let’s try to live in harmony with one another despite the past,” she added.Nyirabera added that the memories can never be fully erased as they will always be there but the best thing is to learn from the past and build a better and brighter future for Rwanda - like we are doing already.If we don’t confront the past, it will remain unresolved and it will continue to haunt us and keep us depressed and traumatized.Revisiting the aspects of the past isn’t bad as long as we choose to learn from it and draw lessons that will only help us live in peace with one another. We can’t change what happened but we can change the future by not dragging the past into our daily lives.Let’s choose to move on and be glad that we still hold the gift of life. The choice is in our hands to either dwell on the past and be sad forever or learn from it and live happily in tranquility.