Managing memories

This past summer served to stir-up my memories as I built up a website for my high school class and had to dig deep into the maze of my shrinking brain. I actually found a lot of pleasure in doing that; perhaps because, as my friend Bill Bocquet told me in one of his recent email messages, “we don't have that many friends that we tend to re-attach to old ones.” At any rate, as I went along I dug and dug deeper and re-discovered so many things that I had totally forgotten. This brings me to another new theory of mine, which goes something like this: The more the life we experience is tumultuous, the greater the demand that’s placed on our memory to store the wild variety of events that come our way, and too many “gems” end up falling by the wayside, because there’s simply not the available room to fit them all into the “immediately retrievable” storage bin. That means that if some of us had chosen a more mundane life, all of our past might still be available at our fingertips. When we pick lives that are more screwed up, all gets crowded and some memories are stored so way back in our mental warehouse that odds are good that we’ll die and never get to revisit them… This is a downer! Today, I spoke with Bernard Gradel, another buddy of mine from the same high school, who reminisced about our common skiing experiences. Among other, he told me that together, we attended a ski-instructor training program in Chamrousse, France, back in December of 1969. He even reminded me that I had sustained frostbites during one of the last days’ exam. He was right; while I sure remembered my injured fingers, I had totally forgotten he was there, with me. The bottom line is that we should treat our memories much better; maybe we should write a journal, a blog or something, to make sure that nothing fall through the cracks, because, at the end of the day, they’re the only valuable asset we’ve got.