Reminiscences

I often find myself in the past, thinking of good times. I delight in reliving moments that suddenly or randomly come to mind, such as the time I held hands with my first college crush all through a movie I can't remember; or the time my high school friend and I, during a depressing summer at home with our parents, went on a ride and got out of the car in some of the heaviest rain I've experienced, and frolicked gleefully and noisily like young girls; or the time my friend and I sat in the corner during softball study hall while the rest of the softball team had a backstabbing gossipfest about coaches and absent teammates, eavesdropped and self-righteously condemned them all to hell.

Just today, my boyfriend of three years (on the 20th), who stays in Atlanta while I live here in Japan, sent an email to me saying he was thinking about the time we went to the beach and drank rum out of paper bag bottles on the sand inbetween boogie boarding sessions. I hadn't thought about that recently, and I was quite happy to be reminded of it.

I often wonder if this living in the past fetish of mine is causing me to miss moments in the present. Perhaps, but the present becomes the past so quickly that I think it's difficult for the brain to keep up. I'm all for living in the moment, but when I think too hard about living in the moment, I find myself thinking about how I will think of this moment in the future when I look back on it. And there I am thinking about living in the past in the future. Maybe part of living in the moment, then, must also be living in the moment that is naturally occurring in your brain.

This Zefrank episode talks about the possibility (postulated by some psychologist) that happiness is more or less inevitable no matter what our brain might think at one time - looking back on past events will always more than likely be with fondness; one example he gives being criminals saying that going to jail was the best thing that ever happened to them. I sometimes realize that my memories of times gone by see me having definitely a lot more fun than I'm having in the present; which means I probably wasn't having as much fun during the memory as I remember having.

Surely this may not be true for everyone, but another example: George Robert Twelves Hewes, one of the only common-ish people who lived during the Revolution whose life was of interest to writers of history, had a goodness-magnifying glass of a memory so much so that he even remembered some things that did not actually happen (The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred P. Young).

The past, once past, is naught but the memories of we and they who experience it, and then however it is presented by whatever historian, journalist, biographer, anthropologist, blogger, or other such writer. It is non-existent unless and until someone thinks about it. So stir that settled cup of memories and spread it around. Let the past exist once again, temporarily as ever, and maybe it will just make someone's day.


(puke... Chicken Soup for the Pleaagh)?