Let’s not forget that precious memories, like a sighting of the magnificent Northern Lights, are worth savoring
My wife and I were reflecting the other morning on some of the memories we had; times we shared with my younger brother and his wife. He’s currently in hospice care and it was helpful to hold him in our hearts and memories.
Even remembering helping him carry a huge trunk into their new apartment in Virginia after he finished graduate school, produced a smile, although I wasn’t smiling then.
I’m convinced it’s helpful to have a memory partner in life. Two memories are better than one. My mind has a lot of cobwebs. Or I often say, I have so much to remember, having lived a long and full life, it’s natural I have to work to find a memory now and then. But fortunately, I can depend on my wife to remember experiences we shared, even to the smaller details. Her long-term memory is excellent.
But both of us share a common short-term memory problem. We will head to another part of the house to do something, only to find when we arrive, we have forgotten why we are there. It’s particularly disturbing when we go upstairs, and don’t know why we are there till we are downstairs again.
One recurring incident of short-term memory loss for me involves my phone. The plug-in to charge it is in the bedroom on the floor. I may plug it in anytime during the day or evening, and then spend 10 minutes looking all over the house for it. Did I leave it in the car, my jacket pocket, lying on the table?I can forget where it is in just minutes, after putting it there.
A friend wrote me the other day and told me how her husband is losing his short-term memory. She wrote, “His ability to retain and process new information are pretty compromised.”
It’s real for many! We need to recognize that not everyone will share our memories, even though they shared the experience.
There are some things I’m confident I’ll remember till I’m no longer conscious. There is beauty! It comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s unmeasurable! Or it may be minuscule! It’s common! Or it may be quite rare!
Going on my evening walk last night there was an especially bright star in the sky. I’m not well-versed enough in the stars to know which one it might have been. Still, it drew my attention to all of the night sky. It was a clear and cloudless night and the beauty of the heavens was memorable.
On the other hand, our house has become a home for some small creatures, ladybugs! They have found the cracks and crannies in an old house and come to visit. Outside, they help, eating aphids in the garden.
Inside, they tend to try hibernating in groups in hidden spaces. I find them mostly in windows and on windowsills or curtains. And even though they can be pests in the home, there is a certain beauty in their construction, their coloring, the way they can take flight.
Beauty is as common as the sky last evening. As the sun went down in the West, it cast beautiful colors all across the sky. Or it can be as rare as the Northern Lights, recently visible in our area.
Some of my most memorable experiences of beauty with human beings came in places and spaces where human differences were starkest. It happened in Riverside Church in New York City, a melting pot of race and class. It happened in Nicaragua, a stew pot of diverse political persuasions. It happened in India, a country and culture that opened my eyes to the enormous diversity of humankind.
It all makes me recall that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and remembering that beauty is an act of “will,” as well as “want.” Human difference can melt into uniqueness and then into commonality.
I don’t want to forget! I hope for a memory that can retain the good and the not so good; a mind that gets a thorough dusting now and then to remove the cobwebs; a visionary recall of the moments of light and beauty life gives us in so many different forms; a memorable summary of human beings loved and loving.
Sitting looking out the window with the morning coffee is a good time to ponder on the issues of the day. It’s also a good time to exercise one’s memory, to remember!
Then we need to speak the memory. It will stick better!
Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.
Photo: Northern Lights in South Dakota, public domain, wikimedia commons
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