Each day, memories sporadically present themselves to us. They dance in our head, taking us to people, to occurrences, to things. An instance in a wedding, a song when we were fifteen, happenstances and funny slip-ups, our child’s first walk, a cheesy love letter, some stranger’s kindness, us boarding a plane, that piece of dark chocolate, a bunch of sky portraits.. The list goes on.
We remember moments — the great, the bad, and the not-so-good. They flood as they please, the unwanted we get to dismiss (if we try hard enough), the best scooped up and relished. In my reveries, I have come to realize that for a good sum of happenings and circumstances, memories do a lot of work in us.
Memories teach us to learn from the past. Memories remind us of how far we’ve come. Memories shove certain moments right under our nose, to allow us that sense of pain, to see if we recognize it now, as a mere echo from our distant past and not as a part of our current baggage. It checks our hearts, about how we feel about someone who used to shake our world, with love or something else. Memories heal. Or continually destroy.
It’s ironic how we can categorically go back to those which tested our strength and faith — the tragic ones, the discovery of some horrible truths, the times we bore the uncertainty of making it or of making ends meet; about surviving a day in that hospital bed, the futile attempts to bring back better days, or having to endure the traces of regret or the torment of letting go. But well, those are a testament to how resilient we had been, of how gracious we were during tough days. Those times also remind us of how we have learned to honor our feelings, to face consequences, to wallow and wail when we needed to, and then, of course, the business of coming out alive.
So much is anchored on memories. How we celebrate a past event or a loved one is always with reference to how things transpired — how people made us feel, what form of kindness we received, how we were made to feel special. There are always takeaways, even from those little injustices that made us wince, of pranks that made us blush. Memories have the power to make tears fall, from deep hurt or from rolling in laughter. Memories refresh the soul or open a wound. Those flashes in our minds are so much about life.
Amidst all I have within me, I choose to spree on the gift of recollection and the life I have. On some days, I deliberately close the tabs that accommodate heartaches, not to forget what was, but so that I can smile my way towards the merry and bright. Not to bury the ugly, (because in truth, we cannot) but to simply go back to the better and the best as often as possible. There may had been years that served us agony, but our imperfect lives have innumerable incidences of miracles and grace, of simple joys and wondrous truths.
Memories are here to stay. What they make of us is life’s design. What we make of them rests on us.
