Memory is an extraordinary thing
Being gifted with a ridiculously good memory is going to be my downfall someday. But my memory is very selective. I might not remember what I had for breakfast this morning but I can remember the very first time I rode a train (I was 19 and it was in Paris *insert boujie face here* Kindly allow my little flex, it doesn’t happen often). I can’t, for the life of me, remember the national anthem but I can remember the names of all my teachers in primary school. Why? I haven’t the faintest idea.
I’ve come to believe that my selective memory comes from the fact that I’m an unbelievably sentimental person. I like to collect keepsakes consisting of the most trivial things imaginable; a ticket stub from a movie, the receipts of every single book I’ve ever bought tucked into the back cover, the script for the first school play I was ever a part of, my secondary school PE and school shirts that have the various signatures and little notes from my classmates scribbled on it from my last day of school before final exams, my final international law exam paper from my university. All little things that might seem meaningless or insignificant to others but hold enormous weight to me.
That got me thinking about memory, the most beautiful and terrible phenomenon of our lives and how it can be triggered by the smallest of things. A particular smell that reminds you of a loved one, a song that reminds you of a party, a quote that reminds you of your favourite teacher, a scar that reminds you of a trauma.
We hold so much history in our lives without ever realising it. Every single one of us has an ever increasing library of memories held within us that can be brought to the surface by a tiny stimulus.
Most people take pictures or videos of their lives to remember or document a certain event or experience. Some have journals dedicated to recounting their lives, recording the significant and the mundane, immortalising those moments in time and the emotions that come with them that they could come back to and reminisce.
I’ve always loved the phrase, ‘a trip down memory lane’. Our memory lanes lead to a memory universe. The universe is the store of all our experiences of life that we have collected that’s constantly expanding, always stretching out with the passing years until we draw our last breath, which then will be ingrained in someone else’s memory universe.
Imagine that? How marvellous is that thought, albeit a bittersweet one. That your end will be recorded in someone else’s memory, and theirs in another’s and so on and so on until the end of time. How one can never truly be forgotten as long as others keep them alive in their memory. That’s the closest thing to immortality we’ve got.
Think about this for a second, all of recorded history, everything we know about the past, the events that occurred, how the ancients lived, the battles fought, the stories behind the greatest marvels of the world come from someone’s memory! Someone who had the stroke of brilliance to write it down, sculpt it or paint it to make it tangible for all to see and remember. What a treasure.
Memory is an absolute necessity for the existence of history, without it, we would know nothing. Can you imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t have the power to remember? Stories passed down from generation to generation, traditions, customs all coming from someone’s memory of it. It’s absolutely astounding!
And all this can be traced back to our power to remember. This wonderful and terrible ability to recall our lives sometimes with excruciating detail or otherwise with hazy, distorted images and sounds.
I’d never fully appreciated my memory until right this moment.
N.B: I wrote this at midnight, on my phone, in the dark and have gone down a rabbit hole with memory, but it all makes sense, which is an achievement for me. Thanks for sticking to the end of my spiralling train of thought! ❤
