February 5, 2024
Greetings from the recollection,
This weekend I saw clusters of young people walking around our town, the girls squeezed into tiny dresses, mincing around in open-toed stilettos, their dates wearing suits and ties, which made them look like pallbearers in training.
Their parents followed them around like amateur paparazzi, taking pictures of every possible interesting moment in the drab winter afternoon. The girls in their spangly dresses against the slab gray sky and empty trees, looked like butterflies that hatched too soon. Here, by the train tracks, here, by the river, here in front of the dentist’s office, the girl’s shoulders red from the cold, the boys wishing they were somewhere else. Pictures that matter for now, and for a while, and then not at all.
‘We are creating memories,’ their parents will think, as they take the photos. But the digital renderings are not the memories, even though they are sometimes worshipped as the same, or more so.
In my kitchen, on shelves too high to reach, let alone see into, there is a collection of teacups, fine china from England, probably brought at great inconvenience by my father on one of his trips back to the U.K. Decades have passed since they’ve been used, but we keep them because there was once some value in the memory of them. We never had those memories; we just knew the people who had them and the experience doesn’t transfer well.
Recently I was talking with my friend Tom about our parents, the rich tapestry of experiences that was their lives. He said that it was likely that our parents would be forgotten in two generations, or at least be unknown. As we will be. He has tried to tell his grandkids about his mom and dad, but they don’t know them, and the experiences will not transfer well. For them, it’s more like memorizing dates for a history test. It was a revealing moment, one I’ve been thinking about ever since.
I know I have good friends who are thinking less and less about me as the years pass and others whose memory of me, the importance of our experience together, gets stronger. But for the most part, people are already forgetting me. What’s more, they can’t literally hand it off to someone else to remember, store it up like an NFT. It doesn’t transfer well. It makes me a little sad to acknowledge that truth, but I know another truth to balance it.
I read an article written by an expert on memory who underscored how malleable our recollection of things is. Even as we remember the meaning of things, we are forgetting the fact of them. The meaning matters to us, and that is not easy to transfer to other people. The ironic aspect is that even as people remember us, they have forgotten us, in a different way.
The significant thing I took from the article is that what we remember most clearly, for the longest, are events that hold strong emotions and meaning for us. And if we want to be intentional about keeping those memories, we can do that best by being fully present, absorbing the details, using our senses, and identifying the emotions in the moment. Remarkably, if you want to be remembered, you take the same path for the other person. Ironically, the act of taking pictures of the moment, or other distractions, can sometimes detract from this.
We all want to matter, to be noticed, to be valued, to be remembered. I think we eventually we realize that this wonderful life we are filling right now, with memories and photos and teacups, will eventually fade and not be remembered, not literally. But that doesn't mean that we don’t matter, or that our existence hasn’t mattered.
It’s like the Big Bang Theory. This creation of existence in an event that happened 14 billion years ago, and it took another two million years for us to figure out the science to describe it.
The light and the power from that event are still expanding in the universe. It still matters even though the original explosion doesn’t exist anymore. In the same way that every star that has now blinked out, still exists, still matters, in the light that continues.
The feelings of our experiences, which is what we carry with us the longest, is part of our legacy.
We don’t give them literally to the people we meet, or to the generations that follow. But it is who we become because of what has happened in our life, and that shows up in the experiences with others, and that’s what they remember about us. And that is who they become because of us, and that matters when they meet the next person.
The more powerful the feelings the more significant the memory. The richer the moment, the longer it stays, and the more it changes us. And as we change, we wind ourselves into the lives of others and they are changed.
The young people in the cold afternoon will care about the photos, keep them longer than they care about them, because they want to remember. But the living of the moment, the cold, the nervous relationship with each other, the anticipation of the dance, will stay with them maybe for their entire lives. The pictures are tokens, maybe evocative of the experience, but what matters is how the life was lived, how it felt.
The china cups are tokens of sorts in that they remind me of my parents, but there is no experience with them, and so the value diminishes faster. There will come a day when the value is lower than the desire for the token and we will give them away, and perhaps they will create new memories for the next owner. This may be a more respectful way to honor their beauty than to horde them, or worship them, for reasons we can’t really speak.
Perhaps I’m trying too hard to say some simple things, but the images help me, and maybe you, to remember. I believe you matter, and you always will, even though we might not recognize how, if we could look into the future two generations or more. Your presence will be felt, the light in you doesn’t diminish just because your star has blinked out.
One day someone will look at the things left over from my life, my favorite mug, photos of the mountains, pictures of birthdays, Father’s Day cards, and have to decide to put it in a big box and put it to the curb. It will be hard, because they are tokens of my life, but the value of those, the experiences attached to them, don’t transfer well. And so, you have my blessings. They are my belongings, not me, not my memories, not my experiences. They are not what matters. What matters is what you are taking with you. How I made you feel, how what I was made you different. And then, what you did with that.
If we do it as well as can be done, if we bring our best selves into this day, we will never be forgotten.
Hope this finds you remembering to be remembered,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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