Events that took place in the past and people that lived before us are still present in many ways, perhaps the most alive way being through the people that exist today. As point IV of the Letter of Peace addressed to the UN points out: “…if History had been different, for better or worse, the future would have also been different. Likewise, through the course of the years there would have been other encounters, other links; other people would have been born, not us. None of those who have the gift of life today would exist.” … Every one of them with their own biography defined by the historical moment they were born into. That includes times of peace, times of family conflict, migration, and a long list of causes and coincidences.

The issue is that we exist now without ever having asked to exist. History, or rather the people who have existed throughout the years, are the cause of our presence in this world. We are the fruit of people who have lived together peacefully and have built very valuable societies and institutions, but we are also the fruit of people who have died or been denigrated due to absurd causes. And this doesn’t make us good or bad, better or worse, dignified or undignified about the life we have been given. It simply makes us the existing beings that we are.

Using today’s criteria to think about other eras, dating and dissecting them like in a laboratory, and labelling people as goodies or baddies, often polarizes history and provokes us to join in with this process of judgment. This is made worse when dealing with periods of war or even local or family conflicts. Today’s people are the fruit of people of the past. This means that we have emotional ties with our predecessors. If we are taught that others took advantage of or killed our ancestors, this could create anger that could then be projected onto the descendents of those who harmed “us”.

Many of today’s conflicts, including family differences are spurred on by inherited grudges. Family, ethnic, national, religious and cultural resentments come from the past; they must be studied calmly. One must emphasize  that we are the fruit of history, however, as was previously mentioned, it was not our fault, nor are we responsible for it. We have been born into a particular time and place, but we did not ask for this to be the case. We cannot be blamed for what happened in the past, because we were not around to cause it to happen. Being aware of our current historical dimension frees us from the past.

Freedom is not an abstract entity, it is a human ability embodied in realities. We are beings that are free from the past. We said before that the past is present in the people that exist now, but it is also present in the consequences of the past, such as economic or social situations, pervading institutions, cultural and artistic manifestations, customs, religious beliefs, scientific and technical knowledge, etc.

And yet, perhaps one of the realities that most embodies the past is collective historical memory. Yes, all the data, books, monuments, buildings, memories, legends, oral traditions, artistic manifestations and refrains used by a community of people to transmit history collectively. Patriotic sentiments of belonging and identity (amongst other things) are carried through in this collective memory… But feelings of resentment and hostility towards other collectives, countries, ethnicity and even other generations within the same collective are also carried here.

This is where an alternative option emerges. When we reach a state of awareness of the fact that we are free from the past, we can opt between feeding past resentments – even though we are not guilty of things that happened before we were alive- being indifferent or working to make all constructive and vitalizing aspects of society prevail over the aspects that impoverish and destroy it.

Point IV of the Letter of Peace concludes that “…The surprise of existing will help those living today strive happily to right the wrongs caused by previous generations.”  Working for a history of peace does not mean just studying certain aspects of history like peaceful events, inter-war periods and peaceful figures, it also means contemplating the tapestry of history with realism, evaluating each moment with its whole spectrum of colours in order to learn about how people have done things in different situations in the hope of achieving and keeping a balanced coexistence or to heal war wounds. It also means demystifying historical mistakes or studying and uncovering peaceful day-to-day aspects of life and common people that have helped secure important periods of peace, but go unnoticed in the big historical picture.