You slip and fall on the ice and bang your head and for the rest of your life you have a tiny scar stretching across your brow, looking like a little corn on the cob, as your aunt used to say. Or you hold the hand of someone you love as they die, feeling disgusted by the clammy grip of their fingers and horrified at your own reaction -- distaste mixed with love. Or you strap yourself into the plane that you told yourself you would never get on and suddenly you are up, and AWAY, and there is no place else to go but down, far below, and that is a somewhere-kind-of-place that you don't want to be a part of, twenty thousand feet below, not yet, not after this moment of elevated bliss.
We all have moments that have shaped us. Affected us. Even molded us, almost against our will. These are the moments that made us realize that we were alive, there, at that moment. We can't imagine ourselves without them. We may be watching t.v. or crossing the street or watching the rain splash against the windshield when those moments come back, vivid and raw, real and alive.
But how often will we really think about them again? I read this awhile back, and it made me think, and it's true -- even our most precious, hidden memories, the ones that drift in and out of our minds as we dive into and out of sleep, are finite.
No, no, no, you say. That's not true. I think about them all the time.
Fine. I'm sure you do. But add it up. Do the math. In the course of a life, how many times will we think about that particular point in time? Ten? Fifteen? Let's thirty.
Thirty seems like a lot. Thirty is a number you can grasp.
Oh, but that's the point, isn't it, that grasping, that wielding, that holding-on, and the scary thing, the finite thing, is that you can count it, you can conceive of it, you can get a grip on a number like that. Your memories have a limit.
I think we take for granted those little pieces of time, wonderful and wretched, that have chipped away at our psyche. When we're wounded or bruised, we reach for similar points in the past that have bludgeoned us -- we compare, contrast, decide which is more painful.
Same goes for the good stuff, too. Was this experience as good as that experience? Our mind flashes back, remembering the brightness and the glee and the sheer, glossy goodness that only memories can provide. And then we store the new experience away. To be retrieved at a later point in time.
Or let's look at it this way:
Something happens to you that instantly reminds you of a previous event or incident or escapade that occurred at some point in the past. You hadn't thought about that memory in years and years, ages really, but boom, here its, back for more. And the thing that reminded you of the old event suddenly takes a new meaning, a heavier resonance, because now it forms a weird, transitory bridge from the self you were to the self you are.
Case in point. When I was in Tokyo a few years back, I was in an Internet cafe, minding my own business, browsing the net, when suddenly I heard the song "I love a rainy night."
And I was instantly reminded of a tape my brother and I had made when we were eight and six years old, respectively, a tape that was recorded at a winter cottage we used to go to every February for a week, and on the tape there is a wild and wacky Scotty Spencer singing 'I love a rainy night', and I had not thought about that moment in years, decades, or that tape in years, and yet here it was, back for more, and maybe that first incident -- me as a kid, singing -- had occurred so that this latest incident -- me as a twentysomething in Tokyo -- would have an added resonance that would cause me to reflect on who I was and where I'd been and how strange and mystical the process of life itself can be, if you think about it.
Maybe somebody up above was orchestrating the whole thing, I think at times, usually before sleep. Maybe the events that don't make sense to us, that cause us pain and joy, are not meant to be understood now -- they can only be comprehended in context, and that context can only arise after years of experience. After living, in other words.
Whatever.
Point is, when you travel, you're aware, you notice, and you reflect. I've seen a lot in Cambodia, stuff that I'll remember for the rest of my life -- but how many times will I think of these things? Five more times? Fifteen?
To be honest, I don't know. (Which is as it should be.) But when the memories do come back, don't neglect them; don't treat them as commonplace. Don't shove them aside, assuming they'll be back. Let them linger. Dwell on them. Think about what they mean, and why, and make the colours in the picture a little sharper.
They may be back again at some point in the future, yes, but they are also here, now, and the here and the now is perhaps the most fleeting state of all.
