Memory

Memory is a virtuosity, not a mere mental picture passively received from the near or distant past, a vital way of actually interacting with a personal history, an essential portal through which the never fully gone still inhabits, animates, and touches each of us. In a very real sense, memories are what we are, the constitutive building blocks of identify from which we come to know of life, love, and loss. Memories can be a source of tremendous inspiration, remembering the ways in which courage once found you, despite your efforts at evasion, emboldening you to venture onto a new path leading to unforeseen pastures of possibility, and, a remembrance can be entirely crippling, the psyche’s resurrection of a past failure, again and again, stifling your ability to imagine any dynamic way forward through the fog of some lingering fear. Memories do something to us, emotionally and otherwise, and, we have the ability to do and deal with our memories, not only remembering, but re-membering, for all memory is both imaginative and constructive. When we notice the dark clouds of despondency rolling in, due to an old aching we cannot seem to forget, we can set an intention, welcoming the fury of the tempest tied to these particular memories, and to understand no storm lasts forever. There is a meteorology inherent to the nature of memory, the swirling coalescence of our remembering and the feelings they precipitate flowing in an atmospheric river eventually leading to a deluge of relief, and affording us the opportunity to move beyond any one emotive climate we might imagine ourselves captive to. We are more resilient than we think, each one of us, and the sunlit meadows of the mind can be found again.