About a year ago I decided to have better memories. It started with a message to myself on another blog, a single line of inspiration from some irretrievably forgotten place: “think further”. It evolved upon writing into:
think (back) further
I liked this idea. I’d already noticed that my memories seemed different to other people’s, from how people talk to each: Most conversations are a reciting of previous events. My own conversations tend towards the imaginary, theoretical or analytical, so in my life-long quest to experience everything, I wanted to try that out. The difficulty, though, was that I don’t remember much. I didn’t feel like I have many memories to reflect on. I wanted to change that.
To do that – to be able to reach into my memories more freely and frequently – I did the usual thing I do when changing something about myself: I adopt new behaviours and ways of thinking, try a few of them out, and keep the stuff that works, and that I like.
For this memory task, I theorised that because I don’t refer to my memories often, they’re not as easily accessible, both because I’m not in the practice of reaching out to them, and also because of how neural connections work (once you relate one spark to another, when one is felt, so too is the other – like a row of people holding hands, when one person jumps, it’s felt by the others next to them).
There are a few actions I took, and continue to practice:
1. Literally, think back further. Every so often, I think about something random, often taking inspiration from things I see in life. For example, I see a bicycle: What other bikes have I seen?
2. Recount the events of the day, and if I can, even the week. This way of thinking contrasts to my usual approach, where anything beyond the past hour or so evaporates into unknowing. Years ago, when I was into the idea of faith, but wasn’t taken by the idea of praying, I took my own approach: To be thankful. This was untied to the spikey ideas of religion, fawning worship, and the bargaining centred largely around one’s own self. Instead, at the end of each day, I would cast my mind back to the earliest point I could remember, and explore what I was appreciative of. I felt this made me both a better, more thankful person, and also greatly improved my ability to remember things that happened beyond the past hour. It also gave me many small epiphanies, as I gained a deeper understanding into the motivations of the different people in my life, and most especially, who were the key players in my own happiness.
3. Explore my memories more. Continuing the example of a bicycle: Where were the other bicycles, what was the landscape around them? How do I feel about this initial bicycle, what did I feel about others before it, and how do those feelings relate? Who can I remember that relates to my memories of bicycles? What have I said about bicycles, what have others said, and why? The biggest effect from this has been a gradually developing ability to almost walk around the spaces in my memories where these, to stick with this example, bicycles live. I can interact with the people around them, and both witness and experience the feelings that also share that same space.
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I’ve been getting better memories lately, different ones. The feel of these memories is something quite different. I have little flashes of things I haven’t remembered before. I’m continuing my adopted practice of exploring them further. They’re more vivid than they’ve ever been, and I can’t point to an event or mental shift that triggered them, they just started happening. Being more vivid, I feel I can inhabit that space within my memory for a short while, like taking a step into a film. I can look around and remember how it felt to be the person I was then. It gives me a feeling of, “oh yeah… that did happen”, and it’s less like the passive act of re-watching an old memory, and more like a lucid dream, where I have control, except that I’m the person I was in that moment.
Dreaming itself has been an interesting gateway into new mental experiences. I can sit up straight, and, being a person who needs to be on their side to sleep, I can dip into the raw emotional and visual clarity of a dream, live completely in that dreamt moment, which I also have some control over – then pull myself back out.
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I’m glad it’s happening now, this new shift towards exploring myself more. I’ve been waiting for the transition to the next version of me. When they happen I become very sensitive and receptive, like I’m in learning mode. I sometimes feel that way now, but it still feels a long way off.
When it happens, I wonder: What things will define me now? I feel as though I have more control over this than ever before, but at the same time, it feels more manual rather than incidental; like I’m deciding to change, rather than it happening naturally.
With each now version, historically, all the old stuff is virtually abandoned. My memories, my ways of being, even my friends. It is always interesting, but I feel as though the lessons I’ve learned before have to be re-learned all over again, and so, mistakes are made that other versions of me would know better of.
So I’d like this time to be different. Rather than the traditional total separation from the old self, perhaps this time I’ll have a stronger relationship with my past. Less a re-invention, and more a continuation, a culmination. Perhaps that’s why it feels so very different now. Maybe I’m experiencing something closer to the gradual change that other people go through.
In any case, I hope, this time, that I’ll feel less fragile.