Memory and Time

What do you recall of your childhood? Do you totally trust your memory? Has it been aided by stories others have related?

Most of us are sure of our memories for the same reasons that Louise Banks states in the movie Arrival. We are bound by the order of time. So our first memories must be our earliest. Or vice versa. What we recall of our earliest years must be our first memories.

I have a memory, one of the early ones, of walking across a dusty rose colored couch with embossed swirls. The arms of the couch were only slightly higher than the couch itself. They were flat and probably about five or six inches across. I would climb up on the couch, toddle across it, step up on the arm, take a wobbly step or two, and crash down to the floor. These images are clear in my mind. How old was I? Maybe eight months. I started walking at seven months. Is my memory, the time and shape of it, really that crystalline for that time frame? I recall little else about that age.

I have another memory. This one is of my mother telling me this story to describe and emphasize her relationship with her sister ~ who didn't like that my mother tried to stop me from toddling across the couch. She told her sister, "Watch her." And I enacted the scene I described. My mother never described the color of the couch or the upholstery. I knew exactly what happened and how. I saw my aunt in my mind's eye. I heard her gasp as I tumbled off the arm of the couch. Had my mother's description become my memory? Had it triggered my memory? Had I recalled it on my own as she spoke? Had I dreamt it?

At the beginning of the year, we look back. Unless we have taken meticulous notes about our dreams, thoughts, memories, activities and relationships, we rely on the vision within our mind. Sometimes we remember an incident one way and another person involved remembers it another. Does that make one of us wrong? How does deja vu fit in?

A friend recently told a story about being in a clinic with a woman who was getting a biopsy. At one point, he felt she needed him. He followed that instinct and asked if he could go back to where she was. She was crying and said she'd been calling out to him. His isn't the only time I've heard this type of story. Where does that fit into our concept of memory? and time?

When you think about the past year, what is the first memory to show up? What is the strongest memory? What story/memory have you told, or has been told about and to you, often enough that you can recall every detail of it? What does memory mean to you? How do you experience memory in relationship to time?

Regret Effect

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

~ Alexander Graham Bell

Life brings many opportunities to choose to focus on either the closed door or the open one. Along with that come many chances to feel regret.

Regret leaves an effect behind when it seems to pass us. It's not always an effect we notice or we name, but it is there just the same. There's a palpable sadness, an internal turning back, a yearning for what was. As we turn back, we miss what is present in our lives at this very moment. We fail to recognize the good, the holy in the now.

When we are given the opportunity to ‘return’ to that past moment ~ a reconnection with a previous partner, a replay of a business meeting, a once-favorite fishing hole ~ it doesn’t really matter. We are different now. Time and life have both gone forward and what we ‘remember’ is no longer what it once had been. There really is no going back.

Occasionally we have to force our eyes and our minds forward, toward the open door. We have to accept that the other door has closed, no matter how much we want it to be different. When we move on with purpose and intention, we find there is grace and beauty in that forward motion. The new doorway that has opened brings its own set of joys and challenges. It is the direction of life.

Are there things in your life that you regret? What do you think would/could be different? How has your life progressed past that time? Have you gone through the open door?

Wibbly Wobbly

Doctor Who fans will recognize this quote from an episode called "Blink." Written by Stephen Moffat, the series writer at the time, it was a simplified version of how time, and time travel, worked. Oh. It was also stated by the last of the Timelords.

I used to consider time as totally linear ~ it only moved in one direction as well. However, the more I read and study, the more I discover that it really isn't quite that simple a concept.

When I was in college, I recall long and heated discussions about time being the 4th dimension. I don't recall anything ever being clearly decided. The primary use for the discourse was the exercise of our deductive reasoning, our capacity to persuade and our imaginations.

Our language often refers to time as "standing still" or "flying" or other terms designating varying degrees of movement. Is that because the passage of time is truly related to our focus or desire? or is it an illusion created by how we focus our minds?

Lately, I've spent time with dreamers. People who re-enter their dreams to discover more of what the dream has to tell them. I've spent time with shamanic practitioners as well. People who slide into other realities for the purpose of healing. Practicing with these groups, I've discovered that time is fluid and you can go backwards and forwards and sideways. Time holds definition only as long as we hold the same definition.

My fascination with Doctor Who comes from that same place within me that seeks out the company of dreamers and shamans. The place where dreams, imagination, healing and time bump up against each other and help me to become more than what I thought I was.

How do you experience time? What teases your imagination? What helps you dream? What helps you heal?