I often find myself feeling attached. Yesterday, was to the memories of my previous home. Seeing it changed, improved, altered… made me feel so attached to that house that no longer is mine. Feeling happy or discontent with the changes…. Funny though, it should have no effect on me though.
3 years filled with memories. So many that most are lost in time. Good, great, amazing, bad, terrible and hundreds others of just everyday things. And now it seems the good ones start to take over all the others.
Saying that I miss that house, is just a way of saying I miss the good things I lived there. The house, itself, is just a place. No more different then the ones I’m living on now. Walls, floor, ceiling, doors, windows… and yet, none of these bring me any feelings of affections, fond memories, they are just what they are. Objects, to which I give no emotion, just functionality.
Our memory is a funny thing. How it filters, how it prioritizes, how it manages emotions and memories.
We are NOT a sum of all our previous experiences, emotions and feelings, but only what’s left in our memories from them. We are what we remember we are. It does not matter who we really are – whatever that means. We, are who we remember. Others, are who we remember them to be. It does not matter who they are or were, it does not matter who they remember themselves to be. For us, they are still just what we remember them to be. All others, are just strangers. Heck, if we forget who we are… we even become strangers to ourselves.
And yet we never remember our memory, this gigantic filter in our brain that decides what matters and what’s not. Decides what’s important to keep, and what’s not. Decides who you grow up to be. Decides what you remember of others and how you see them.
Eh…. we, Humans, try to take control of course. We write diaries, we write blogs, we keep memories, we keep tokens, we keep souvenirs, we take photos, we take movies, we take everything we can to remember what we want… but in the end, does it matter? Does it make any difference in the end? Our brain will only remember it if you read it again, if you see them again.
It’s like the movie “Memento”, one of my all-time favorites. Not as dire as the movie of course, but, in the end, we only remember what’s tattooed on our brain. We don’t even remember how it was imprinted there. Or why. Or by whom. In what circumstances. And yet, we shape our decisions based on what’s imprinted in our brains, be it truth or lie. And more often then not, it’s neither truth nor lie, but a distorted mixed of truth and fact, mixed with lie and dubious interpretation.
Ephemeral Mementos 