The Teachings of Memory
It’s a beautiful blue sunny day in London. The plants sit pretty on the window sill beside my string of books. A DIY painting stares back at me.
This very moment feels very surreal. I am letting go of a bittersweet exchange that happened a little while back. As I get older, the acceptance quotient has improved. The broody younger self has become more patient and forgiving. Today and everything about this day might or might not be a part of my memory archive. I have been pondering a lot on the placement and displacement of memories. Life has been pretty much the same, except that I spend a lot more time on calls with tiny humans.
My nephews and nieces are all toddlers yet teach me the great truths of life. The daily conversations on the most trivial topics light up my day. There are days when they wake up wanting to talk to me and days when they don’t want to come near the phone. I am amazed at their ability to adapt and evolve with each passing day. They sure have a mind of their own from this early age. I am cherishing these moments before they get lost in the scales of time. As much as they enjoy the playdates with me, they will barely remember all the fun as they grow up. My mum used to narrate stories of aunts who used to spend a lot of time with me. Whenever I saw them, their eyes lit up, remembering their fun with the younger version of me. I could hardly recollect them; hence couldn’t relate to the warmth. My brain wasn’t able to preserve those memories. It wasn’t intentional, but the act of growing up displaced them into some rusty chambers which were out of reach. The feeling of being forgotten is not a pleasant one in such scenarios. I will perhaps face the same fate, especially with these childhood memories. I know I will be around them as long as I live, but these cute conversations will be a distant memory. I try to record as much as I can through photos and journals. Letting go is an evolutionary process. We constantly re-arrange our memories. Come to think of it, I am about to master the art of memory edits.
Life has a brilliant way of teaching one to navigate through the labyrinth of memories. Another recent realization was being comfortable with not being in the professional center stage after more than a decade of full-time work. The transition from full-time to independent work is humbling and ripe with experience. As a full-time worker, I managed an extensive portfolio that involved constant communication with many people. As I transitioned out, the social conversations also reduced with people due to my exit and distance. The grand ritual of being forgotten was once again at play. It was an emotional surge as it was a life-altering change. Well, such is life. It moves on, and there is nobody to blame for this slow change. It goes on as it always did and how it should. I imagine these memories like leaves falling from the tree before the onset of winter. There is nothing dramatic about the falling of the leaves. That’s pure science, yet the whole process feels so poetic. The leaf withers and falls, but the trees stand tall. Some memories are implanted in our life forever. Some will fall and return to the ground. They might or might not get connected to the soil of our being.
Clinging is a primal act, writes Michael A Singer. We all cling onto memories but hesitate when it comes to the acceptance of being forgotten. While early childhood memories might not be prone to coerced edits, it changes as we become adults.
What we treasure and what we purge is a matter of choice and survival. Oliver Sacks beautifully articulated it in his book, Hallucinations;
We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
As I get comfortable with being forgotten, I can’t help but close this rambling with the plot from one of my favorite sitcoms. In “The Good Place,” Chidi agrees to go for memory reset to help save the new experiment. The reset means that Chidi will be letting go of Eleanor and others. But Chidi finds his way back to Eleanor and his friends each time. I know it’s somewhat unrealistic to think of this example, but hell, who cares. The memories and people that matter will always find a place in life. It will be far from perfect. The cycle of creating and churning memories will go on and on. The malleability of our memories, the act of being forgotten, and forgetting are critical elements in this alloy of life.
I know that even after a zillion resets, I will find my way back to my nephews, nieces, loved ones, books, poetry, songs, and all that I care for in life.
