There has been comfort and solace as well as grief and pain.
My memory is exceptional.
It has provided many instances of laughter between me and my friends. We have relived moments at particular restaurants, parties, work days in the newsroom or control room, funny sayings, funny facial expressions, funny outfits and hairdos we sported – in style at the time but quite funny all these years later. We thought we were really cool, and we were. We didn’t have all the cares of “adulting” then. The money was good, the responsibilities were fewer in number, we made time for each other, we actually had dinner parties, no one was tied to their phone.
Those are the good memories.
The other ones come when I am by myself and seemingly appear more frequently than those that entertain.
What I do know is this situation is not mine alone. It is an unfortunate side effect of being a human. The tendency is to spend more internal time thinking about the ways and moments we could have been better.
These intruders remind us of the missteps, the poor decisions, the questionable behaviors, the wasted dollars, the bad relationships – personal and professional, the lessons learned and the cost of them. Not everyone holds on to these things for the same lengths of time, but it would be an outright lie for anyone to say some of these things hadn’t crossed their mind, if only fleetingly, giving them pause to reconsider what might have been different.
There’s no reason to cling to these memories though as they continue to resurface it stands to reason that they are serving a particular purpose which needs to be acknowledged. After that nod they can take their place on a very high bookshelf that holds things we know we can’t discard but we don’t reach for every day. We dust them off from time to time to remember we’ve improved.
I believe if/when I write about these things, it is easier and quicker to let them go, to give them the air, to diminish their importance by shining the light on them. Don’t the elders say sunlight kills germs? It’s time for some things to die so others can live more joyfully.
Stay tuned.
December 2, 2021