Most everyone can look back on their life and find a period of time that feels empty–a time when nothing of much importance happened, a time with few, blurry memories. That time has no real defining qualities, and its boundaries might feel fuzzy. Time collapses in, and memory of experience becomes a formless, indistinct blur. It could be two months of your life, or it could be two years, and it would make little difference in terms of how you remember it. Depression is often the cause of this phenomenon–you will often hear people who suffer from depression describe their experience of life as being smothered in a thick grey fog–but the more general reason this happens is a lack of strong memories being formed.
A good portion of my life is like that, and I feel some regret at the loss of time. We are not our memories, but it certainly feels like it sometimes. When I think back to the parts of my life that are gone, there is often a very real sense that a part of me is missing. The sense of self is something we cling to very strongly, and perceiving a loss or lessening of that sense can bring about some strong negative feelings.
Making memories helps prevent this from occurring, as does being mindful of life in general. Being aware of things provides a texture to your experience that helps you retain it, even if it isn’t otherwise particularly memorable. Over the past few years, I have also played with a few more explicit strategies to help prevent this from occurring.
- Journaling: Every day, I write a little about what happened, how I was feeling, or anything relevant going on in my life. It is generally not very long; usually, just a few sentences. When big events occur, or I am in the middle of a major emotional arc, I will write more fully about what is going on. In a sense this is formalized mindfulness, as the process of reviewing the day and picking out what you want to record requires being aware of what is occurring.
- Weekly Drawing: At the end of each week, I draw a picture encapsulating how I feel about the week that has just ended. Often it is straightforward–just a picture of the most important event that occurred. Other times, it is something that characterizes whatever the prevailing mood was. It can be other things too; the only requirement is that the drawing reflect the past week in some way. I draw in a notebook, which allows me to flip through and see a high-level summary of the past. Doing this reinforces those memories, especially when you go over them regularly. Having these weekly checkpoints also acts as a sort of scaffold which you can hang other memories on; it allows you to place events in time more easily. For example, the memory of X becomes tethered in time–instead of being an un-sequenced memory, it becomes something that e.g. happened right after your trip to Y, during the week you were feeling emotion Z very strongly. This is pretty helpful in preventing the unordered jumble of memories that sometimes occurs, and promotes a stronger sense of narrative.
- Yearly Review: It’s been my New Year’s tradition for several years now to take a few hours and go over all of the data I’ve collected for the past year (including the journals and drawings), and get a good feel for the year that has just finished. This is a wonderful way to create a sense of a personal story (if that is something you want to promote). It is been so instructive to me in just how easily we forget and misremember things, even things that seemed very important at the time and seem very clear in memory. As time goes on, you build up your own story, and looking at your records allows you to see just where your memories have diverged from reality. This divergence is indicative of what the mind likes and dislikes about you, and your experience; learning what the mind prefers to misremember or elide is fascinating, and gives you a great window into why the mind does what it does. It also gives you a much better perspective on what makes you happy and unhappy–when you see yourself writing about the same thing day after day, it becomes clear how much particular things matter, in a way that is not always obvious when you are living through it.
