Choosing to Remember

"Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?"

I think about this line from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow often.

While eating breakfast this morning I flashed into nostalgia for an old house in Silver Lake I used to live in. I remembered its beautiful and intimate front patio where I ate the best bagels in the world with J & D one morning early on, where I'd spend quiet afternoons looking up at the trees, and where we'd occasionally host dinner parties on warm nights. This is the best form of nostalgia: not for vague stretches of time but for moments, feelings, sights, smells. I thought about how our times in that home already feel distant, and how they'll soon be long in the rearview. A future time that is honored more by memories of memories than the real thing.

I think honor is the right word. I express gratitude for the past by recalling it. By tracing what I can make out of its outline. This makes the next effort to remember easier. Sometimes this happens without intent, brought forth by a conversation, or feeling, or smell, or nothing so precise. Sometimes I remember despite my best efforts.

As Marx notes in that quote above, the secret hidden in plain sight when it comes to memory is that it can be a choice. It's obvious and illuminating at once. Like any skill, it can come with ease in some moments and pure agony in others. Sometimes I search and find nothing, fumbling around clumsily in the darkness. Others, I look and see clearer than when the memory first happened.

I'll admit that effort can spoil remembering. Those serendipitous flashes like I enjoyed today are a gift that's hard to beat. Writing sessions spent forcefully recording the events of a day or trip can be exhausting and hardly useful. Besides, Many of the memories that linger are not those I intend or anticipate. But not all deliberate remembering must be so desperate. Some of the best reminiscing comes by way of prompting people I love to do it with me. Even simpler, it can come by hanging around them and looking or listening.

Another way to encode memories is to do so as they happen. This delicate dance of presence and noticing is tough to execute, as both demand my attention. Maybe that's why so many of my best memories are feelings, not specific details. Feelings are the kind of passive recordings that presence inscribes. I've spent plenty of time so intent on making great memories that I forgot to be there. Still, I think it's possible. When I hear the music and I'm in the stream: time among friends when the conversation is soaring or while taking in a sunset that words can't describe. When for only a moment I realize what's happening. Not long enough to miss a beat and lose the rhythm, but a half-step just for me to pause and take it in. Perhaps: a chance to fold in the corner of the page so that I can return.

Deciding to remember is, above all else, about gratitude. An emotion with a similar trick: it's completely up to me. It's as simple as deciding to be grateful. When I'm grateful, I fly a little lower to the ground and look more closely at the view. When I'm grateful, it's easy to remember. A grateful disposition can even help cultivate more awareness in the present. Gratefulness is a reminder that this is the good part--that it's all the good part.

This, right now, in front of me, here.