Alexandersmap

    Category: Memory

    • Forever and Always Now

      Reflecting on the moment

      You said time makes the wheels spin
      And the years roll out and thе doubt rolls in
      In the truck stops, in the parking lots
      And the chеap motels
      When will we become ourselves?
      — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Hashtag

      The other day I was talking with a coworker at a hotel bar in Washington, DC. He’s a few years closer to retirement than I am, doesn’t travel all that much anymore in his current role and isn’t the picture of health (probably related to too much time in hotel bars). He mentioned that he’d never visited the Lincoln or Washington Memorials before, let alone the war memorials on the National Mall. He wasn’t sure if he would have the time on this particular trip either. I looked at him, said “why are we sitting here now?!” and summoned an Uber. For the next couple of hours we visited memorials to those who exemplified greatness in the United States. I took a few pictures of and with him and shared them with him afterwards. Memories must be built, not stumbled upon.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where, when I compare the former me to the current version, I usually forgive that former guy for not being better at the art of living than he was. We must figure things out along the way, or be lucky enough to have a guide to show us the ropes. We become ourselves through deliberate acts more than stumbling along through life. When we do stumble, we figure out a way to get back on track again. Being human is full of opportunities to learn and grow.

      The thing is, we must keep challenging ourselves to step out of the box we’ve grown into. It may be bigger than the one we were in before, but it’s still a damned box. The answer to “when will we become ourselves?” must forever and always be, now.

    • Sinking In

      “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things. Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.” ― Franz Kafka

      “The meaning of life is that it stops. Only the moment counts. It determines life.” — Franz Kafka

      The truth is, I’m way overbooked this weekend. Life stacks up its moments some days, and leave you wanting for more others. Ours is not to reason why, as Tennyson put it, ours is just to do or die (three quotes dropped and I’ve barely started writing—imagine where this post is going). The point is, we ought not question the crazy moments any more than the quiet moments, but savor them all just the same.

      I celebrate and savor and seek to capture the things I’d forget one day, that I might remember. I’m not gifted with a photographic memory, but I’m blessed with an inclination to document the moment with a picture or a note in the journal that will jog it all back one day. I think the truly blessed are those who recognize the fragility of it all and wrap themselves in the blanket of now. I’m not declaring I have it all figured out, merely that I’m aware of the time passing by. Here and now are all that matters. We ought to let that sink in before it all flies away.

      We are all collecting experiences, big and small, and building a lifetime of memories to store them. Knowing we’re the sum of our parts, I mourn the things I’ll say no to in my days just as much as I relish the things that are heck yeahs. We must never defer what we may do now, unless we’re embracing something else just as profoundly interesting for us. And that’s the underlying truth in this jumble of words and thoughts coming to a blessed conclusion: we must relentlessly sink deep into that which interests us most profoundly. And not someday, but now.

    • The Present Hour

      “I follow you whoever you are from the present hour.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

      As small as we are in the vastness of the universe, we each nonetheless leave our mark on history. Every interaction stays with us, every poem read, every sideways glance, every hint of fragrance in the air are a sum of our whole. We may make a big splash or a minor ripple, but we all have our verse to contribute. The magic in writing is carrying that verse across time.

      We are a collection of hours arranged as a lifetime. We whittle them away as if they were unlimited. We learn as we grow older that each had value, but some shine brighter than others. Applying this realization to the next becomes ever more essential. Whoever we are in this moment, whatever we make of it in the now, will indeed follow us for the rest of our days. Our ripple, through those we encounter, is carried further still. What will we lay upon the shoulders of those who will carry us with them from this moment on?

      Autumn is in the air. Harvest time is well underway already. The seasons signal that time is flying along, with us in tow, ready or not. What will we remember of this time in our lives? What will people we encounter remember of us? May we smile recalling the gift we gave in this present hour.

    • Slicing Out the Moment

      “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” ― Susan Sontag

      There’s a cool feature in iPhone photos where you can view the map of where your thousands of photographs were taken, with thumbnails of the photos overlaying the spot it was geolocated. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve been and what we saw at the time we were there. It’s a momentary slice of our lives from the past, and we get to relive it with a virtual flyover as we zoom in on the place. And in doing so, the pictures from that place come back to us like a flood of memories.

      I’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs, mostly with my collection of iPhones since those became the technology that replaced a camera. But my Instagram feed is only at 1700 posts. We all save the best pictures to show others, don’t we? But that particular platform isn’t always friendly when formatting our favorite pictures, and so they fail to make the cut. Not so with our library, where with time and patience we can scroll through everything to find memories.

      I’m that person at parties and family gatherings taking all the pictures. I do it because I know the moment will soon be gone like all the rest but some fragment of it may live on. I’ve captured people no longer with us, full of hope and happiness or sometimes with a knowing look that this may be the last photo you’ll get of them. My favorite Navy pilot once observed this as I insisted on taking his picture with his grandchildren. It would be years before he passed, but his belief in my motivation for taking the picture stayed with me and does to this day.

      The thing is, all of our past moments are dead and gone. The people and places live on within us for as long as we are alive, and then we in turn live on in others for as long as they are. Beyond that is beyond all of us to know. Immortality isn’t ours to achieve, but our image may live on beyond the living memory of all who knew us. So too may our words, should we be so bold as to write them down for all to see.

      We all know the score. Tempus fugit (time flies), memento mori (remember we all must die) and so the only reasonable answer is carpe diem (seize the day). Capturing a few images along the way allows us to look back on a life well-lived and trigger memories that may have faded. Memories of places and people and moments that once were our entire life for an instant and now a layer of our identity, gently folded within us for the rest of our days.

    • Life’s Good Runs

      “Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.” — Seth Godin

      We each go through distinct seasons in our lives, not just age-based but in what we are focused on. We look back on them fondly or maybe not so fondly, but we can see exactly who we were at the time and know it brought us to who we are today. School days, sports played, people encountered and cherished for awhile, books read and discussed, career rungs climbed, places visited that seep into our souls—these are all good runs that we remember for the rest of our days. A lifetime may itself be a good run, made up of a series of other runs played by the distinct characters we were at the time.

      I still identify as a rower even though my rowing days on water are far in my past. Millions of meters on a machine in my basement aren’t quite the same, but the feeling of the catch made perfectly resonates across time and place. How many great catches did I have? Who’s to say but we know one when we feel it. Either way, that stroke ends and we recover for the next. Like skiing and life phases the goal is to put together as many good ones as you can in the time allotted.

      At the moment, I’m on quite a run of blog posts, but just last week I was wondering if this particular run was over for me. Not quite yet, but we’ll see how life unfolds. We each have good days and bad days, and with each morning a chance to begin anew. There’s a certain thrill in publishing something just when I thought I’d had enough to say and found some new plot twist to unpack.

      We recognize when we’re in the midst of a good run, just as we feel when a good run is ending. We’ll look with trepidation at the next run wondering whether we’ll enjoy that part of the ride, knowing that there are some things we most definitely won’t enjoy at all. We can’t rush through the bad parts to get to the good parts to come any more than we can hold on to the good parts forever. Life unfolds and we adapt to it and grow. What comes next is important too, but let’s not forget the thrill of the run we’re currently on.

    • The Places We Will Be From

      Closing time, you don’t have to go home
      But you can’t stay here
      — Semisonic, Closing Time

      There’s something comfortable about staying in place. Things feel more natural and familiar, after all, and this is where all our friends are. But life is change, and we too must embrace it. Even the farmer, seemingly always in the same place, changes with the seasons. Most of us aren’t farmers, but we ought to listen to the wind and watch the level of the sun and know our place in this world will not be what it once was. We must be change agents for progress to happen.

      Closing time, time for you to go out
      To the places you will be from

      It’s easy to think back about who we were then. It’s harder to imagine who we’ll be in the future, let alone to map the path from here to there very accurately. Surely, there will be unexpected twists and turns along the way. The future is not ours, any more than the past is us today. But we do have the present, such that it is, to do with it what we will. Someday this will be who we used to be too. So we ought to make it a great story.

      Closing time, every new beginning
      Comes from some other beginning’s end

      When one door closes, another is said to open. How many doors have closed already? No matter—not really. What matters is the door opening in front of us, and our willingness to step across the threshold to what’s next. Life is about reinvention, rebirth, renewal. It’s closing time on some older version of ourselves, isn’t it? We can’t stay here forever. But as with any great adventurer, we should develop a strong sense of what’s next.

    • To Shed, and Grow

      “We must be willing to get rid of
      the life we’ve planned, so as to have
      the life that is waiting for us.

      The old skin has to be shed
      before the new one can come.

      If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
      When we hang onto any form,
      we are in danger of putrefaction.

      Hell is life drying up.”
      ― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

      Walking on the beach last week, I picked up two shells. One was tiny and in perfect shape, the other larger and more surf-beaten. Shell identification is not my game, but I like learning new games.. Based on a helpful shell identifier web site I found, we’ll call the small one a Threeline Mudsnail, the other a Shark Eye. I regret not holding on to the Shark Eye if only for the name… but I digress.

      We know that Hermit Crabs swap out old shells for new as they grow. We know that snakes do something similar with their skin thus making Campbell’s analogy resonate so well. Potted plants grow pot-bound and begin to fade if we don’t repot them into something bigger. So what of us? Why do we try to hold on to so much of our past instead of growing into the next version of ourselves? When we create a life for ourselves, parts of that life are going to fall away from us. People come and go. Favorite restaurants close. Developments are built in woods that used to speak to us. Everything changes and so too must we.

      Lately, a few friends have left the company I work for in favor of greater opportunity for themselves. In each case I cheer them on to do great things with their lives, even as I feel the loss of their contribution to the place where I still work. We must grow or risk drying up in the old shell we’ve built around ourselves. Like my kids growing into adulthood and moving to other places, these work friends will still be in my life, just not every day. It’s not a goodbye, it’s until we meet again.

      The trick, I believe, is to stop feeling so comfortable with the character we once were and begin feeling comfortable with the idea of a new identity. When we decide who we want to be and begin the process of becoming that person, we are shedding our old skin. We often wonder after we’ve left it why we held on so very long to something we were so ready to leave behind.

    • The Beauty in Our Memories

      “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” — Virginia Woolf

      I was scanning through some old pictures while looking for a certain image to highlight a conversation I was engaged in and smiled at the memories in the scroll. We forget the blessing of pictures in our march through time. I am that person taking pictures at gatherings because I want to lock in some of those memories. Of course, there’s a fine line between locking in memories and living in the moment. We must first live should the moment slip away.

      In the moment, we know when something is special because we enjoy it so, but we may not realize the impact on our life until well after. We become anchored to these moments with memories—both our own and those of others, through photographs and other media, and through triggers. My mind would go back to the summer between high school and freshman year of college were I to smell the cologne I wore at that time. It floods back to me even writing about that cologne. I haven’t worn cologne since then, making it a uniquely strong trigger for that time in my life.

      I’m attending a reunion tonight that will place me with some of people who may associate me with that cologne. Surely that’s not the whole of my identity, but it might be something that would trigger memories of the character I was then. Reunions are time travel events on their own, and surely stories will bring us back there more than some long lost production of cologne. In all that jovial recollection I hope we remember to savor the moment to lock in those memories to follow. For that’s what makes life beautiful.

    • Reminiscing

      Friday night, it was late, I was walking you home
      We got down to the gate and I was dreaming of the night
      Would it turn out right
      Now as the years roll on
      Each time we hear our favorite song
      The memories come along
      Older times we’re missing
      Spending the hours reminiscing
      Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait
      I said to myself when we’re old
      We’ll go dancing in the dark
      Walking through the park and reminiscing

      — Little River Band, Reminiscing

      I may write about it now and then, but I’m generally too busy living in the present to dwell on the past. That doesn’t mean I don’t fondly reminisce about the best days, while cringing now and then at the worst days. Life lessons, each and every moment along the way.

      The benefit of a journal, let alone a daily blog, is seeing just who you were then. Who had those dreams and aspirations, doubts and fears? How did it turn out in the end? How have we turned out, this work in progress marching through time?

      Reminiscing isn’t simply living in the past, it’s rewinding ourselves to another version of us and seeing what we’ve learned through our experiences since then. It’s not so much dancing in the dark as putting a spotlight on progress made. Though dancing in the dark to the right music sounds lovely too, don’t you think? What tune are we singing lately? Will we reminisce about it as fondly?

    • So Apart We’ve Grown

      One of these days
      I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter
      To all the good friends I’ve known
      And I’m gonna try
      And thank them all for the good times together
      Though so apart we’ve grown
      — Neil Young, One of These Days

      Talking to an old friend, we asked each other about other old friends. Who have we seen? Who has drifted away? How are the kids? It was a reminder of the person I used to be who danced with the world in the best way he could at the time. We’ve grown so far apart since then. Yet we’re still the same in so many ways.

      The thing is we’re all becoming something more as the layers pile on. Those layers either smother who we once were or keep that person warm for the day when we fling off the years and dance like it’s 1999 again. Like a tree, those growth rings differ year-to-year. Some years are better than others, some are distinctly harder. We reach for the sun in good times and bad and put the seasons behind us, until one day we look around and wonder where the time went.

      One of these days, we’ll all get together again. We won’t miss a beat, I expect, just as we didn’t miss a beat last time. Somewhere deep inside us is the person we were then, thrilled to come out and play the part once again. Sure we’re all so very different as life rolls along and sometimes over us all. But there’s a spark of energy between old friends that remains to rekindle the flames of our youth. A time before mortgages and divorces and funerals for people we thought would be here with us now, in this very conversation, talking about who we were then.

      Those conversations change as we grow, from who we want to be when we grow up to who we want to be now that the kids have grown up. That’s a lot of growth to catch up on some day when we get back together with those old friends. Now is just another growth ring we’ll laugh about (perhaps someday). We all know that the future is coming for us soon enough. But those growth rings make their own music. And we have so very much to catch up on.