Is Memory More Real Than Life?
This summer, I have been on a bit of a walkabout, retracing steps from my earlier life, giving myself a little space to hear my own thoughts again. It has been a long time coming. I have been thinking about the things that 'made' me in life...the experiences and places that have been seminal to evolving who I am.
I am currently on the Isle of Iona in Scotland, a place I used to come for my birthday in my mid-thirties, when I was still single and had a salary. What used to be a quiet, powerful place for me to reflect is now, while still powerful, almost unrecognizable to me. Walking the road to the abbey, I pass what used to be sheep pastures, but are now lush organic gardens for hotels that have reinvented themselves and now serve art for food. Many of the ruins have been restored and are now managed by the National Trust, sprouting visitor's centers and museums. What used to be places in which to wander and be quiet, now require hefty admissions fees and have morphed into 'sites' with signage and audio tours.
I found it to be the same on the Navajo Reservation, where I also lived for several years in my thirties. Driving up what used to be a narrow dirt road to the edge of the canyon, where I would sit in a small cave and let my mind roam...there are now concrete paths, steel railings, signage, and admonitions, in no uncertain terms, to stay on the path. While I understand the need for some of this, for protection of environments that see so many people come through, it has still disturbed me, thrown me into a strange place where my lived past no longer exists.
I am finding that so much has changed, everywhere I go, and while this is not a surprise after 37 to 47 years - nor should it be - what has interested me is that my memories are far more alive in me as I stand in these places, than the reality I am surrounded by. Is this because the memories have been with me longer, because they were formed by strong emotion or, have they grown in strength and color because this is the way I have remembered them for decades?
All of this has me thinking again about memory. What of all we have experienced, do we pick out to remember and carry forward with us and why? Is it even reality? Was it ever? Or is it a story we made up around a certain event to give it meaning or to confirm some idea we already had about an event or about ourselves? Do we even remember the actual event, or only our last memory of it, as has been suggested by some of the science? I am a firm believer that the more often we think of something and remember it, the more 'reality' that story takes on for us. It makes tracks in our brain. I think many of us have done this for so long - told the same story over and over - that it actually becomes reality to us.
It is interesting to consider, given how we cling so tightly to some of our memories.
Go to Chapter 15 in Making Sense of Menopause, the one on Midlife Course Corrections. There is an exercise there called String of Pearls that can help you sift through your memories and re-choose the ones you want to define yourself by now. See what comes up for you. It can be life-changing to make those choices.
