Your goals in life are as subject to your many perspectives. Your mental, physical and emotional experiences shape your path in life, forging towards your future. Memories are like anchors, in that they tether your current experiences to your past ones. They prevent you from going adrift, but also prohibit your progress in your personal development. Memories of past triumphs can help power you through present frustrations, just as memories of past failures can limit present success. These anchors to the past can help you survive the most difficult of tides, but can also burden your present endeavor if not brought back from the depths.
The Influence of Memory
To regard memory as an anchor to your past experience allows for great triumph in future endeavors. With this regard, new adversity can be faced with the confidence of past triumphs. It’s important to be wary of past failures, as those memories may also affect your ability to address present situations completely.
A fisherman having lead a successful career, will push through a storm to catch dinner. He will say to himself “I will brave this storm, and will be rewarded with fish like always.” A man who has never caught a fish may say “Why would I subject myself to this misery, I’ve never even fished before?” The fisherman’s bountiful memory helps him see the storm as a mere hurdle in reaching his goal. The man having prior fishing experience will likely see the storm as yet another reason he doesn’t choose to fish.
Certainly, a large aspect of this example would founded on how badly either man needed the fish. If it were for recreation; both would likely avoid the storm. If it were to avoid starvation; both would likely brave the storm in hopes of survival. In either case, the men have their choices influenced by their past experiences — of which they are connected to my their memory.
Anchoring to the past can serve as a valuable means of overcoming present angst, but the ability to untether yourself from past experiences is vital to foster personal growth. Confidence in knowing when to drop anchor, or when to remain untethered in the storm, is an ability gained only through the wisdom of experience. The first step in harnessing the power of your memory is to understand that it is only a record — not an adversary.
The Perspective of Memory
Drawing from the concept of our lives being experienced from 3 unique perspectives simultaneously — the mental, the physical, and the emotional — memory can begin to be corralled. A memory of a broken bone is largely physical. A memory of a silent waiting room is mostly mental. A memory of past love is nearly pure emotion. These are the perspectives through which the world is seen by us, and while each offers a entirely unique experience, most every part of our life is seen through a union of the three.
Imagine seeing someone you loved from your past, but haven’t seen in years. The experience of seeing this person might trigger your emotional memory, and you may feel happier than you were before. Emotional memories are much softer around the edges, and seem contagious even. Happy people seem to infect others with their happiness, while sad people tend to darken the lives around them. Emotional memories are learned from exposure to other people and events that trigger emotional responses. Like muscle memory, the emotions can be quickly recalled even after years of being subdued.
After feeling a rush of happiness and excitement from seeing this person from your past, you might engage in conversation related to shared events of your lives. Being able to talk to someone about the past, and imagining how it might have affected their future involves heavy use of mental memory. For example, to ask “where are you living now, did you ever make it to the sea?” is a question that involves not only the recall that person wanted to live near the sea, but also the ability to understand a past thought might be relevant to their future.
After you’ve exchanged initial greetings, you may find that you hug your friend. This hug may spark a familiarity of senses; scent, touch, and even the sound of their breathing. These physical responses may illicit deep memories from your, and you may find yourself realizing you remember that hug as if you’d seen them yesterday. You may find your hands rest on their sides just as they used to, and that the grip of your hands seem to remember the shape of their torso.
These different perspectives of your experience with a past love represent three fundamentally-different windows through which we engage with the world. Just as we might experience an event through one of these three lenses of perception; so too might we remember an event through the perspective of whichever lens we are most focused. What ever might be the difference between a thought and a feeling, would almost certainly be the difference between a mental memory and an emotional imprint.
The Dynamics of Memory
These concepts are among the most basic of our lives. The perspectives through which we see the world are at the root of how we define our Self. Your balance of perspective is akin to your fingerprint — an arrangement unique to only you. Your life experiences have shaped your perspective, your memories of those experiences continue to shape your life, and to ever be more than product of coincidence you must learn to shift your perspective.
Imagine three houses; one house is brick, one is wood, and the third hardened steel. Each of these three houses are in need of repair, although each requires a unique approach. To alter the brick, you’d need a sledgehammer to break apart it’s mortared joints. The change the wood, you’d need a saw to cut through the timber frames. The change the steel house, you’d need a fiery torch, to burn through their powerful atomic bonds. These three houses are like three people; unique in how they have come to exist — yet similar in their goals. Each wants to change, yet each must change in a manner suited to their structure. So too, for people who wish to change the structures of themselves and their lives; they must first understand the means of how those structures were built. Only through this awareness, are we able to understand how to expand ourselves, to heal ourselves properly, and to become stronger and more resilient to the changes of the world around us.
To remodel a house built of brick, you must first be practiced in swinging a heavy hammer. Before you are able to heal an emotional trauma in your life, you must first understand how to connect to it. While gravity and weather may stop us from building houses, fear is the element we must battle to build upon our selves. In imagining you Self as the concert of different perspective, you can better understand to unique approaches in catalyzing personal growth. To realize a memory haunts you not as a mental adversary, but as a bridge to an emotional trauma, is like the realization that a hand saw will never cut through a steel girder. You need to know the materials you’re working with, and only then will you be able to find the proper tools to be effective in their renovation. To understand your perspectives in life as being multi-faceted, you can begin to examine how they come to be.
Perspectives, and the memories attached to them, are rarely ever split as such easily-separable types. We remember events as blends of emotional, physical, and mental perception. A memory often invokes an emotion, the pain of an old injury will spark a memory, and running freely in the sunlight might create new emotion all together. The human experience we have of this dance perspectives is Human Experience. Everything you see in your present is correlated to what you’ve seen in your past. To benefit from new experience, a pillar to personal growth, you must be able to allow yourself to perceive through anchored perspective. If you see a man wearing a grey sportscoat, do you imagine him to be like the other men you’ve met that wear grey sportscoats? To do such is to allow your past to control your future — the truth is that this man is an enigma. This is certainly a valuable survival skill to avoid threats, and to correlate similar experience outcomes. Being consciously able to step outside of that schemata will allow you to shape and remold yourself into a more evolved version of yourself. This will help you to become what you wish to be rather than what you happen to be.
The Strata of Memory
How is a familiar emotion different from a familiar scent? Imagine perceiving each without your memories to draw upon. You would be much like a child — experiencing the world in it’s rawest, most pure form. Unadulterated experience is a rare luxury in the modern world. Nearly every experience we have gets interpreted through the lens of previous experiences. This helps us survive, and frees up valuable attention resources — but cages us from perceiving raw experience without adulteration of our own bias. To build the conscious ability to remove anchors to your past from present experience can free you to grow new understandings of the world. To do so, you must first realize how the layers of your own perspective work to build the layers of your memories.
Each memory you create is a combination of the mental, physical, and emotional impression you had during an experience. Raw physical experience creates muscle memory, raw emotional experience creates feelings, and raw mental experience creates thoughts. Yet, we remember how people make us feel, we remember how food smells, and we recognize the texture of our favorite clothes when touching them. Each unique perspective you view the world through creates a unique facet of your memory of any event. To begin to master the power of memory you must learn how to focus on the different strata of which they are comprised.
If you have undergone an emotionally-traumatic event, perhaps the death of a loved one — isolate which part of that memory is the most burdensome. For most, it is the lingering emotional experience which is the most difficult. This memory is almost pure emotion — hard to conceptualize, and unable to be fought physically. Understand this memory as a over-balancing of energy towards your emotional perspective. To lessen the burden of this emotional weight, you must focus more energy towards the physical and mental facets of that memory. For example, imagining how your legs felt physically upon hearing tragic news can help lessen the burden of the emotional weight of that news. It may seem bizarre to pervert one’s natural tendency, but it is effective in taking control of how you are effected by circumstance.
Imagine yourself experiencing an extreme physical pain like a broken bone. The searing, throbbing, relentless presence of this experience forces your perspective almost entirely into the physical. Your memory of this even may seem vague when trying to recall it in detail. You might remember being in extreme pain, but have difficulty remembering color of the wall in your hospital room. Any experience that is extremely tilted towards a single perspective will be remembered with extreme bias towards that perspective. Understanding how your memories are made will help you better understand how to affect their control over your present perception.
The Application of Memory
If a past failure in business made you feel inadequate, you might choose not to pursue a new business opportunity. The memory of your past failure may make your fearful of feeling that emotion again. When considering a similar decision in the future, it may have an emotional tone similar to that of your previous decision. Part of you may assume your next attempt will result in the same negative emotion. After all, the glass of milk you had this morning tasted the same as the glass you had yesterday — that’s how memory works. Sometimes this works to our advantage, and sometimes it’s a burden. The key is in choosing when not to let your memory affect you negatively when working towards goals.
You may not be able to avoid fear from a financial decision that has failed in the past, but you can recognize that the emotional aspect of your past mistake that is affecting your present mental decisions. You previous failure wasn’t caused by how your felt — it was caused by your mental decisions. Your current decision won’t be successful because you feel good about it, it will be successful when you make good mental decisions to support it. If you allow your connection to past emotions affect your current mental focus, you will become caught in a vicious cycle of repeating mistakes. For every failure you make from fear of a past mistake — you will only strengthen your connection to that negative emotion by bridging more failures to it. Understanding how your memories are made, and how they affect your present life, can help you free yourself of the past and work towards the future that you imagine for yourself.
