For example, as anyone who regularly reads these musings will already know after me tediously going on and on about it for several lifetimes now, I recently went on holiday.
All very well and good. Yes, I had a nice time, thank you for asking.
A couple of days ago I was watching a TV programme that had been filmed in much the same neck of the woods as I visited during my trip and I was able to say, in that way you might have, “Been there!” only…
Somehow it was difficult to grab a hold of the memory and convince myself that I actually had “been there” if you see what I mean...? Somewhere, in the back of my mind there’s a bit of me that knows with something approaching absolute certainty that between one huge slab of working days at the start of the year, and the latest ongoing slab that I’m currently negotiating my way through, there was a definite two-week period when I was far away from all this in another land, enjoying other experiences and trying to live in the moment, but somehow it’s very difficult to believe that I was ever really there.
I think that it’s got a lot to do with everyday routine. The days can all get very similar when you stack them up one after the other in the average working year. Day after day, all of them exactly the same, with very little variety. I’ve had entire decades manage to slip away into that particular sea of monotony, as, I believe, many other have, too. Of course it is always those little variations that do help the individual days become slightly more “memorable” than those that immediately surround it, but, after a while, the repetitive routine seems so “normal” that it is the aberrations, the ones that stray from the mean, that somehow don’t quite fit the pattern that the brain is trying to construct and so it seems to download them to a deeper, darker file that is far more difficult to access.
Instead the brain remembers a whole pattern of similar days and the ones spent in the sunshine, on the beach or whatever don’t quite fit in some way, and are therefore buried and it’s sometimes just very hard to imagine that you ever did anything else at all. You look back and your mind tells you “Work day, work day, work day…” etc., back as far as you can remember. There’s a “blip” between the work days a few weeks ago, but the brain dismisses that and the pattern can feel like it is just an endless, unchanging list of those very similar days.
I don’t know, perhaps it is just me, but I really struggle to get a grip on those days filed away as “other” which is why I’m grateful for the photographs even if it’s becoming very difficult to believe that it was actually me that took - or was in - them.
I do have some theories, though, about how to combat it. Perhaps I need to book my holidays far longer in advance. This would, I trust, increase the levels of expectation and anticipation by such a significant degree so that hopefully, when the great day of departure itself actually arrived, it would seem far more “special” or “memorable” by having been so looked forward to, and subsequently, the arrival (“Finally got here!”) would seem that much sweeter.
If only I could get away from all that fretting and worrying about things that I do…
This is, after all, why people spend so much time and energy in planning their weddings, I suppose, otherwise you’d just get up, get hitched and carry on with life, which might seem a bit “Meh!” in retrospect.
The other option is far less practical and involves taking a week off both before and after the fortnight of the holiday itself in order to allow the brain time to adjust to a different set of circumstances. I do believe, after all, that retired people really seem to enjoy their holidaymaking far more and get far more benefit from them than the average working stiff does, and I can only put this down to that their brains are entirely focused on the holiday itself and all of those tricky little things like deadlines and emails and meetings don’t clutter up their minds in the same way and, instead, they can just allow themselves to concentrate entirely on the tricky little notion of enjoying themselves, capturing the moment and having a bit of fun.
Whatever that is…
I’ve often struggled to manage to “live in the moment”. Recently I tried to capture some moments on video using a function of my little camera, but it’s still difficult not to remain detached from them when you’re sitting in your own living room watching them on TV a couple of months later. It can still feel like it was really someone else having all of that elusive fun.
Even if I genuinely try to sit myself down, gaze towards the horizon and really try to force myself to remember a particular moment, whatever it might be, and make a real attempt to seize it and hold on to it tightly for all it is worth, I can still find it hard to picture myself there, even though I know deep down that I must have been.
Bloody hell, it’s hard being me… I know it is, because I
Apparently we remember everything but our subconscious mind decides what we are allowed to actively remember, sometimes completely wiping some trauma or another from our minds, other times letting us remember that putting your had in a fire can hurt.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a good thing. I for one wouldn't want to remember every single moment of my tangled and quite futile life.
Perhaps, as they say, it is better to live in the present - mundane though it is.