Memory

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This month: Memory

If you look at it in a certain way, you could say that our lives are made up of memories.

The best case scenario is of course that we live largely in the present moment. Mindfulness teachers will tell you that we're happier when we do that. (Sadly, we have a tendency instead to replay past difficulties or worry about potential future disasters.) When I say, "Life is beautiful — don't miss it," that's a big part of what I'm talking about. Paying close attention to the lovely, fascinating, meaningful, moving things that are right-here, right-now makes life so much richer.

But on the other hand, there's research suggesting that revisiting positive memories can contribute meaningfully to our happiness.

And others — Ira Progoff, for example — have emphasized the "stretchiness" of the present moment. That our psychological sense of "now" can stretch back a bit in time and reach into the future.

So that means that even our "now" actually includes memories — three types, actually. (Or, to be more precise, three stages.)

When we have an experience, it first gets recorded by sensory memory — a fleeting record of what we saw, heard, etc. — which gets lost to us entirely after (at most) a few seconds if we don't consciously make an effort to remember it.

The sensory impressions we pay attention to then get recorded in short-term memory, where we store the information temporarily so we can process it. This too is fleeting, though — usually staying with us for no more than a minute.

It's only the things that get moved into long-term memory that truly stay with us — for days or months or years — or for a lifetime. Some of those memories are explicit (i.e., part of our conscious awareness), while others are implicit (e.g., things like motor skills and our conditioned responses).

When we talk about "memory" in an everyday sense, most of us mean long-term explicit memories — which could be either semantic (facts and general knowledge) or episodic memories (things we ourselves experienced).

What we'll be primarily focused on this month inside Joybook as we explore the theme of "Memory" is that second kind...

Remembering last year's vacation, formative childhood experiences, a recent conversation with your best friend. Or — just as likely — not remembering details of a vacation from ten years ago, or what your neighbor's house looked like when you were growing up, or a story your best friend told you last year.

Memory is unreliable. Unless an experience made a big impression on you, or is repeated often, or deeply tied to your sense of identity, it can quickly fade into a distant, fuzzy memory — or disappear entirely. But at the same time, we've all had the experience of stumbling upon a memory we didn't even realize was still with us. Something can trigger an association — a scent, a song, a passing remark — and suddenly a long-buried memory can snap vividly back into consciousness.

Memory is tricky and unreliable in other ways too, though. Our feelings, thoughts, and subsequent experiences can all color, reshape, and even degrade our memories. Things other people tell us can impact and change them too — and how we feel about them. Sometimes we can even remember things that didn't actually happen to us.

Yet we rely on our memories as foundations for attitudes we form, decisions we make, for problem solving, making plans, forming relationships, and so much more.

And how we interpret and hold those memories has a huge impact on how we feel and what we do. Our relationship to certain memories can absolutely impact our "now moment" — as well as how we feel as we look back over our lives — and the choices we make as we move forward.

So your memories are very much a building block for your Beautiful Life.

This month we'll examine together how we can capture more of the memories that contribute to our happiness and well-being — as well as going in-depth with the question of how we can relate to, work with, and build on past memories in ways that make for greater peace and a more beautiful, meaningful, satisfying life.

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