f.8 the fluidity of memories
memories
One day a couple of weeks ago I was driving down a road I’ve travelled often in life. It’s not a highway, but it’s a thoroughfare through the city in which I grew up and live. It’s only a couple of blocks from my parents’ house, it goes past both my elementary and junior high schools, and I can see several friends’ parents’ houses just looking down side streets as I drive past them.
It doesn’t take much effort for me to slip into the past and remember all of fond, humorous, and sometimes crazy things that I did growing up. In high school we drove past another friend’s house, rolled down the windows, and screamed unintelligibly at all hours of the night. (I’ve no idea why, but it was fun, regardless) Down another road is another house, wherein I spent a good number of hours playing games with friends. That house is now owned by strangers, my friend’s parents are both dead, and her family dispersed. But when I look at that house, I’m sixteen years old again in my mind. I can see the cars that were then parked in the driveway, and the colors of the house change to what they were when I often visited it, not what they are today.
In that nanosecond of visiting the past, I remember all of the happiness that happened in my life in that nexus, and then I blink, and I’m back in the present. This happens to me often as I grow older, I’ve found. People move, people change, and people die: such is the condition of being human. But our memories are our most precious commodity. Some argue that we’re all different people because of our DNA, and I won’t dispute that assertion. But while that separates us physiologically, even people with identical DNA (twins, for example) are different people. The differences that matter are in the things that happened to us throughout life, and these things we store as memories.
Like everything, not all memories are good ones. But, with a little bit of discipline, we can control our memories to an extent. Under no circumstances do I wish anyone to excise or attempt to exorcise a memory: painful as they may be, they define who we are and how we’ve become what we are. If we cut out the adversities we’ve faced in life, we are left with hollow shells that have learned nothing of merit.
The image I selected to represent this posting is the linear path of life intersecting with the exposure of a memory. That memory can be expressed in a myriad of ways, but I’ve found that the lenses through which they are the happiest memories, or the ones where in we learned something valuable are the best to use. Darkness and sadness abound, and we cannot avoid them entirely, but with our memories, we can hearken back to the happy times in our lives, and in doing so, make our own days a bit brighter, smiling and fond things remembered.
—memoria est fluidum —
intuityfluidityutility.wordpress.com 