NOTHING IS AS GOOD OR BAD AS WE REMEMBER IT TO BE by Pennie Hunt

Weird things come to my mind when I am in the shower. Sometimes amazing ideas hit me.
Sometimes it is an errand I must remember to do or a call I need to make. Sometimes it is memories of things that have happened in my life – yesterday or decades ago.
 
These thoughts can play out in odd, quirky little rhymes that don’t rhyme well or make much sense, but they lock my brain on a snapshot of time, like…
 
We built castles in the sandbox and
    washed them away with the garden hose.
 We traded wobbly training wheels and scraped knees
     for first love and butterfly feels. 
Life teased us with promises and possibilities,
     that we never took seriously. 
Life was simple, time was slow,
    we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Life was quiet and like the sand,
    time slipped quickly through our hands.
 
If you are like me, we recreate memories the way our brain wants us to remember them. From our perspective, ​it i​s enhanced with a bit of imagination that makes the memory better or worse than it really was.
 
For example, if you went to a new restaurant and had the best meal of your life. You can’t stop thinking about that steak or bowl of pasta. You can still smell the sizzling steak. The sauce on the pasta was worth the stain it left on your favorite shirt. The meal was perfect!
 
A month or two later you go back to enjoy it again. It isn’t as good as you remembered it to be. It was good but you glorified the memory in your mind- making it better than it was.
 
We are also good at making bad memories worse than they were. Every time we run it through our mind it’s worse and more painful. Our mind loves to make bad situations more dramatic. 
 
When we remember good memories of having a pleasurable experience with people we care about, we feel happiness. So, emphasizing the memory of pleasure increases our happiness during the time of remembering.
 
In the same way, emphasizing the feelings of pain when we relive difficult memories increases our sadness and devastation. ​This can keep us stuck in anger or despair.  
 
We can manage our memories. First, we need to realize that we can’t erase or change the memory bank in our minds. All deposits are there for a lifetime- there is no withdrawing them.
Simple childhood memories may be remembered very differently by siblings. We all have a vantage point and perception of how things happened in the past. This doesn’t mean that one person is right or wrong – we just all have individual, personalized memory files.
 
Next, we need to pay attention to how accurate our memories are. Have we glorified and enhanced the good ones?
 
I will never discount how devastatingly painful memories can truly be tied to tragedy. These will forever break our hearts. This is the holy ground of memories. The memories of grief and loss that are yours to hold as sacred to your heart. But be realistic about many of your bad memories… has your mind enhanced the drama by taking them (unrealistically) from bad to tragic?
 
Lastly, we control how often we visit memories. It begins in our mind- what will you give power to and what has power over you? If we are in a world of constantly reliving things that happened in the past, we are missing out on living life now. Enjoy the feeling of good memories. Don’t allow the bad ones to cause you to live in a constant journey from one pain point to another pain point.
 
Visit your memories. Let them wash over you as a quick trip to the past. Trying to change or erase them is like trying to hold water in the palm of your hand. It won’t work.
 
Maybe my little nonsensical poem makes more sense than I thought. Maybe life does tease us with promises and possibilities that we don’t take seriously. Maybe as I watch decades of memories drift through my mind and down the shower drain, I realize I didn’t know what I do now… life is like sand and slips right through our hands…memories and all.
                                 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 
                                                    Pennie’s Life Lesson: 
                         We can’t erase or change the memory bank in our minds.
                All deposits are there for a lifetime- there is no withdrawing them.
                                             ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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​YOUR TURN...        
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                                                                 Thank you!  ​
                                      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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