Changing Memory

I don’t know about you, but I find that many people in their middle years seem to enjoy nothing better than living in the past. Their retrograde memory takes them through a rosy nostalgic distortion of the good old days, or at least what they consider to have been the good old days. To them, everything was better in nineteen-forgotten. Somehow crime did not exist, family life was perfect, people were more polite, and so on.

And then there are those with a selective memory. They remember only those things they want to remember. For some it’s some past hurt they have nurtured for decades because they hope to, some day, be vindicated. What’s the use? As far as I am concerned, a selective memory can be put to better use by rejoicing in reliving happy events, while throwing the hard facts of pain and heartbreak out the window. After all, do we really need to overload our memory bank with what is best left forgotten?

Someone said that a clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. While it may have been said in jest, there is some truth to that statement. As the years pile on, happy are those who disregard the less-than-perfect aspects of the past to concentrate on the present. After all, we cannot go back to change history, and ruing what we may have done and might do differently today is a waste of precious energy. For me, there is much too much living on which to concentrate at this very moment.