It is hardly surprising that old people forget who they are.
Over and over I have experienced the AHA moment of remembering something I
thought I would never forget: peak experiences, insights, knowledge of my inner
self, whatever. In fact, I am amazed that after so many years of existence I can
remember myself at all! So many memories, so much time.
Perhaps I am tethered to reality a little more loosely than
most, but given the opportunity to let my mind roam around an issue or create a
dialogue about an event, I am astonished at how often I find a nugget of
myself, learning a personal truth that I swore I committed to memory and
apparently did not. Because here I was discovering it all over again–I knew
that!
Themes and memes from the
past remain salient now and in the future, but each time I seem
destined to start from the beginning. Musing will often find the shortcut
to an answer that I worked out before, but why can’t I just start with the
answer and expand on it instead of forgetting I already know where to begin? Why
is that previous realization not part of my conscious mental arsenal? And
how many other answers will I NOT encounter, NOT bring into the present with
me? How easy would it be to miss some important element of myself, as in where
my limits are so I won’t go over them again or where my joy is so I can have it
once more? It is an easy step from here to see that it would also be easy to leave behind even my name and address in a serious moment of attempted
recollection, an attempt that could fail in the confusing fog of so many
memories.
We assume we know who we are and, in the scheme of things,
so we do–as long as we have interactions that reinforce those assumptions. People
call us by name, we live at an often repeated address, our children’s
expectations shape our responses. But what happens when people who we have
counted on for years disappear, when our living circumstances change, our
children move away, our partners die? Certainly less contact with the pillars
of our existence encourages forgetting.
Perhaps more important, it takes energy to sort all those
memories and pick out our own thoughts from dreams, others’ stories, even
movies and books. We need to be motivated to spend that energy, to have some
purpose for continuing to know ourselves. Such purpose comes from intensities,
from passions, from love now and in the future. If you have lived your life for
others who have gone or as only a reflection of your culture and your
surroundings, it will be more difficult to find that golden thread that is you.
Not only will you have less motivation to “find” yourself, you will have less
skill at deliberate recall of a “yourself “ that you
never were very aware of to begin with.
So easy to get lost.
All this is not to say that collapsing brain cells will not
interfere with even the strongest sense of self and passion for the future.
Certainly this kind of deterioration is a wicked way to lose your self, a sad
and despicable facet of physical decay that confuses, perhaps eliminates our
memories. But these are exceptional circumstances and I am only now referring
to the exigencies of living a typical life to a typical end–the difficulties
in keeping it all straight in our minds.
And once more (for perhaps the hundredth time) I come to the
conclusion that practice is the answer. That an examined life is the road to
retention, no matter how often I astonish myself with my forgetting. No matter how much longer it takes as
experience piles up. No matter how much energy it takes to sort those piles.
There is no other way.
Powerful...
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