They say that time heals everything.
Yes, it does... but how and why?
When we feel physical pain, as long as we have not lost our life, limbs or anything else irretrievably, we find that over time, our bodies heal by themselves. We have a remarkable capacity to recover from physical wounds because of the design of our bodies.
So, time does result in the healing of most physical wounds, but what about non-physical ones?
When we suffer a mental, emotional or spiritual hurt, does time heal this as well? If so, how?
The obvious answer that most of us can attest to is that yes, time does heal all hurts, even those that are not physical to some extent. Now this does not mean that emotional trauma disappears, even after many years. But, over time the pain that we felt when the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual harm was initially inflicted on us, declines.
Why would this be?
When I think of spiritual, mental and emotional states, the one thing that I see that they all have in common (at least in my limited material experience) is that all of these states relate to the mind. All experiences that lie in this world are experienced through our minds. To some level, all experience is a mental exercise. How can one possibly heal the mind? It is such a complex structure, not one that can be fixed easily...
The one double edged sword that each of us has been granted, the one recovery granted to each of our minds is our ability to forget.
We are not omniscient, we do not know everything and this is for the best. Being limited enables us to actually forget things. Forget pain, forget hurt, forget betrayal, forget our own faults and, ironically... our own limitations.
This is the one escape granted to each of us. Over time, we are given the ability to forget some things. We can sublimate our pain and move on because we slowly forget... Now, if we have lost a loved one, that does not mean that we forget our loved one, far from it. Rather, we do tend to forget our daily interactions with our loved one. We slowly don't miss them quite as much. We slowly move on. We slowly forget little quirks of theirs. We will never (God Willing) truly forget the essence of those we love, but we will forget the details.
Many thought experiments look at what it would be like to have knowledge of everything... I feel that it would be terrible to live as a human while having omniscience as God does. To never be able to truly forget pain. To never be able to move forward and progress... to never truly need to. God in His infinite mercy has given us the gift of forgetting. We can never be perfect, and that is truly an amazing gift.