“It is not just our bodies that are fragile, our hearts are softer that the Wallabies defence in Scotland, only one sad movie away from being that eight year old inside, still remembering hurtful things.” ANTONIO DI DIO continues his Brief History of Kindness series.

Memory is a funny thing – gloriously unreliable, it is a bit like self perception in other forms. 

You look at yourself in the mirror and are okay, if front on and holding your breath – but imagine if you saw what you really looked like (anyone reading this with a perfect little ski bump nose can stop now. You and I can never be kindred spirits)? 

Similarly memory’s inaccuracies often recast events in a way palatable to our own self view. And thank God for that. 

But some folk I know share a strange quirk – they remember every dumb, wrong, foolish thing they’ve ever said or done. 

At first this is not a bad thing. You say something mean or do something thoughtless and somehow it gets seared forever in your head, and that in turn should hopefully ensure that you don’t do it again, making you a better person. No different to touching a hotplate as a child and learning that there is something to avoid. 

I once gave Mad Dog out LBW in a cricket trial to a ball that would have hit first slip instead of the stumps, subconsciously because I was next man in and wanted a bat. I felt terrible. Did he remember it? 

I met his best mate at dinner 32 years later and it’s the first thing he mentioned! It led me, when my kids were small, to be scrupulous in umpiring and be the best person I could be on the field, but it also made me so obsessive that I did not enjoy those games nearly as much as a dad should. 

As years pass, and new follies occur (we are the accumulation of our actions and daily habits, after all, and none of us are perfect all the time), the list we carry in our head of all the things we’ve done wrong can become a tower, reaching ever higher and burdensome. 

It is the person that is crushed, as, to shamelessly stretch a hardworking little metaphor, they carry that tower everywhere they go. 

One of the cruellest things someone said to a child years ago was: “I forgive you but I will never forget this”. Because that ain’t forgiveness. And because that child is now a woman in her seventies and is still carrying it, the shame and hurt, and has been punishing herself for decades for something that the victim had forgotten for years, and is no longer alive to forgive. 

It hurts more the closer you are to the person or the more serious the outcome. It’s taken me 25 years to forgive the St George Illawarra five eighth for the 1999 grand final, but he can happily live without my approval or that of idiots like me he’s never met and whose opinion matters as much as a thesaurus to a camel. 

Still, it can also hurt if you receive judgement, a rebuke, and no chance of redemption or reconciliation, for the most trivial of things, from the most unrelated of people. Think a road traffic incident – you do something dumb, a fellow motorist is irate – they scream or shout at you and make a rude gesture, and drive away. 

The issue is minor, there is no malice or negative outcome, but you’ve been judged and punished for guilt, and you’ll never know the other person to defend your case or, if you have none, to apologise and move on. Trivial? I’ve seen people crushed by the judgement of others they’ve never met and will never know again, over a lane change.

All of which is to say, there is so much opportunity for real kindness and decency every day in just the act of living with people. Take your pick – you can help with the old traumas people carry or you can simply not add a new one to their lives by being patient, gentle, trying to understand. 

We say that ”words don’t matter” and “gee, that’s okay with me” but the reality is that it is not just our bodies that are fragile, our hearts are softer that the Wallabies defence in Scotland, only one sad movie away from being that eight year old inside, still remembering hurtful things. 

If when making speeches we imagine the whole audience in their underwear, then similarly, whenever anger rises within you at another, think of them as vulnerable and afraid. Half the time that’s no trick, it’s just the truth. 

Antonio Di Dio is a local GP, medical leader and nerd. There is more of his Kindness on citynews.com.au