Memory is a tricky thing.

It’s the past pulled into the present.

It’s the taste of yesterday’s lunch echoing through the synapses of the brain long after the food itself has been digested by the body.

It’s a lost moment that wriggles like a fish at the end of a line — always flip-flopping around, showing itself from a different angle than before.

Something ephemeral. Amoebic. Amorphous. Impermanent.

Memory is experience without action. Which makes it a dangerous drug. People turn to memories for the same reason they turn to cocaine: for the emotional kick.

And each memory has its effect:

Sand castles on the beach for happiness.

First day of school for anxiety.

Grandparent’s funeral for sadness.

If you’re not careful you can wind up spending days here, in your own past, sequestered in an attic full of black and white photographs, surrounded by dusty toys.

With memories vivid enough and a nostalgia powerful enough, you don’t ever need to leave this isolated room. If you become thirsty remember the last time you had a glass of water. If you get cold, recall sitting by the fire last Christmas. If you’re scared remember a time you were brave. If you’re nervous remember calm.

Do you see? Believe in the past desperately enough and you can convince yourself that you’re there. It’s a neat trick, none can deny, and many of us are masters of it.

But it’s also a lie.

I don’t say this with any venom, only earnest. Because of all the things we think we know and understand, there is nothing more important than realizing that our time now is new — realizing that it can’t be “kept” by our watches and clocks and sundials and timekeeping devices. That it will be spent whether or not we choose to spend it. That it never, despite our firm convictions, ever belonged to us in the first place.

It carries us along always, downriver (Gatsby died beating his boat backwards against this current).

Only after we’ve seen this fact clearly can we begin to understand that we are alive in a place we’ve never been before. That the clock might read three o’clock every single day, but today’s three isn’t the same as yesterday’s three. You’ve moved to a new place in time.

This is how Heraclitus (another of those Greek philosophers – as if you hadn’t had enough of them by now) can get away with the claim that “a man can never step foot into the same river twice.” The river carries new water past at each moment. And the man is different each moment as well. He is a living, breathing carbon-creature who eats, excretes, gains, loses, blooms, dies like all other things. Each second he is filled with different thoughts and emotions.

This is Socrates, who having been labeled the wisest man in Greece, famously says, “Ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat – I know only that I know nothing.” Here someone has asked the smartest guy in the ancient world’s most developed city why he’s so smart, and he tells them it’s because he knows he’s dumb. It’s easy to laugh at this, see it as a joke. But it’s not. 

Here, let’s break it down with a simple thought-experiment: 

Socrates goes down to the river every day. And every day he dips a net in the water to catch whatever is passing by. The first day he gets a leaf, the second day a fish, the third day nothing.

After his three days he observes that he’s pulled up something different in his net every day. He’s somewhat intelligent so he reasonably deduces that the river is different each day as well, and he might continue to catch something new each day. 

If he only fished the river one day, however, he might logically wind up believing that he’d catch the same thing every day. And leaves aren’t a very appealing catch so maybe he’d never come back to the river again.

This is the power that memory has over us. We draw from our memory bank to develop our beliefs — and if we have only one or two memories to help us form these beliefs they might wind up being a bit lopsided, narrow-minded. 

Again, Socrates, if he were to make only one memory of fishing the river, would walk away thinking leaves, leaves, leaves.
Everything we know depends on what we’ve experienced in our past – welcome to religion, tradition, and even science. We learn from what happens to us. Our mistake is turning useful theory learned from yesterday’s experience into dogmatic fact that we apply in the present. Socrates isn’t an idiot. He just doesn’t believe in fact. Theories are much more flexible, responsive to the demands of real life.

And we’re back to memory.

The premise is this: it’s always a new time and we’re always in uncharted territory.

The observation: we still lean on our memories of last night, last summer, last year, to guide us through the territory we’ve never been.

Laid out like simply, our reliance on memory seems a backwards tactic. Like using Christopher Columbus’ 1462 map of the flat world to chart a flight from Portugal to India

…and we’re surprised when we get lost.

It’s no wonder we’re all so confused when our car keys aren’t where we always leave them and our first boss says everything we learned in college is out of date and when, over the years, our friends change . We’re surprised when things that have never happened before go on and happen. It doesn’t match up with the historical record we’ve got imprinted on our minds.

Memory is an incredible thing. It’s a true, magical ability to traverse time. But we love our memories to the point that we often get so lost going backward we forget the forward progression. We spend our time reliving our past experiences, which really is no different than spending our present to relive our past. This is paying to roll a pair of rigged die.

Just like you already know the numbers that’ll show when you roll, you already know what you’ll get when you dip into a familiar memory.  There’s no change. It’s sevens all the way down. Don’t lose your life on a meaningless gamble.

But we’ll keep going on in this way because it’s easy to believe that life is the pursuit of pleasure and if we have the ability to repetitiously pull feel-good memories out of our back pockets (say rolling sevens at a craps table in Vegas?) why wouldn’t we?

We’ve turned memory making into a kind of ritualistic art. Hold on to enough memories and you can piece together a kaleidoscopic hallucination of pleasure, happiness, sadness, grief, wonder, curiosity and all the rest. That done, you can pull it out of your mind at any time, pop it in the blu-ray player, and hang on for a wild ride. Eke enough stimulus out of your past life and you don’t have to live anymore. You’ve got enough data stored in the archives. No need to assume the risk of living for real from this point on.

Ah, sweet memory. Quite a temptation.

…there’s something in the scripture about that.

…apples for lunch and such.

— Nomad