Memories, activities and dreams

Memories can be good, bad or anywhere in between. What do we do with them? Should we give equal billing to all memories, or be selective and only entertain the more pleasurable ones? It seems to me that my most pleasurable memories have a better life span than bad ones. Sure, I do remember my car, ski and other accidents as a way not to repeat them; but they’re just mental mileposts and I feel very neutral about them. My other bad memories can be recalled at any time but they don’t seem to affect me emotionally. My interpretation of that response is perhaps that I lived the situation to its fullest (that is, with a strong emotional response) when it happened, but past that point, my emotional tank relating to that incident seems empty. If I have, at times, held grudges at people who might have done me wrong, that didn’t last very long as I seemed to have an uncanny ability to move on. Is this because I fully process emotions when they occur? That might be the case. Now, if I try to examine how I process my very good memories, I can only say that they’re always there when I retrieve them, but they don’t overwhelm or obsess me. They generally are small, fugitive vignettes that are not necessary vivid. In fact, they might not be as sharp as my “bad” memories, because the emotional imprint might not be as intense. In digging deeper into the topic, I see that it’s hard to separate memories from the timeline, involving past, present and future.

The past
I believe that past memories are the building blocks of experience. Whether they are pleasurable or terrible, the impact past memories made on us somehow protect us from future pain and disappointment and drive us towards pleasant situations; they make us stronger and able to cope. Are bad memories better teachers than good ones? I can’t seem to tell; they all contribute to forming us along the way. …

The present
The more I think about the here and now, this is where the action is and this clearly is the place that I enjoy the most. One of the reasons time seems to fly so fast now that I’m retired is that I do what I really love, with a healthy stress level. I would say that I’m now living in the present like never before and I love it.

The future
Since I'm so much absorbed by the present, there is very little time left for thinking about tomorrow. Is that because I’m now “over the hill” or because my day is so full that I can only handle my daily load? In a sense, this makes me sad, because thinking about the future is the essence of dreaming. Simply put, too much activity kills the dream.