Tomorrow morning, my husband and I will be helping our oldest daughter move into her dorm room at Queen’s University here in Kingston, Ontario. It seems both impossible and just-right to think that we are at this stage of life. This summer, I’ve felt a not-unpleasant pressure to make lasting memories with Samara, so that she can look back later on this transition time with gratitude and nostalgia.
I have been riffling through my own memory vault this week, looking back on other milestone moments. I try to call up the images and feelings from Samara’s first day of kindergarten in 2011. The photos we took help (but perhaps also limit) my recollections of her in her pink dress, huge backpack, Velcro shoes, and blonde braids. I remember the smell of the clean lockers and freshly waxed floors. The sounds of excited little voices and the squeak of new shoes. The comfort of her teacher’s reassuring smile.
I reach 16 years further back to my own move-in day at the beginning of my freshman year at Dordt. I have no pictures to assist (or limit) my fuzzy memories. Setting up my brand new computer. Meeting my roommate for the first time. Watching our dads build our loft so that we’d have more space on the floor of our East Hall room.
I find myself wondering if I am remembering things accurately. Wishing I could remember more.
Neuroscientist and memory researcher Charan Ranganath’s recent book, Why We Remember, explores these (and many other) wonderings.
Life is short. The transient nature of memory can make life seem much shorter. We tend to think of memory as something that allows us to hold on to the past, when in fact, the human brain was designed to be more than simply an archive of our experiences. Forgetting isn’t a failure of memory, it’s a consequence of processes that allow our brains to prioritize information that helps us navigate and make sense of the world.[1]
Remembering isn’t really riffling through and pulling up static snap-shot-like images from a filing cabinet in our brains. Remembering well includes the important process of leaving things out in order to prioritize and make room. And remembering always includes active reinterpretation. Every time we remember, we are updating our memory. “Making memories” is not only what we do at the beaches and amusement parks of our summer family vacations, it is also what we do every time we think back on those sun-soaked days. Ranganath writes:
When we remember, we do not passively replay the past. Accessing a memory is more like hitting PLAY and RECORD at the same time. Each time we revisit the past in our minds, we bring with us information from the present that can subtly and even profoundly … alter the content of our memories. Consequently, every time we recall an experience, what we remember is suffused with the residue of the last time we remembered it. And on it goes.
Each remembering, Ranganath writes, “is one link in a neural chain, subject to edits and updates, so that over time, our memories can drift further and further from that initial event.”
So it seems that we inevitably edit our memories. Most of the editing happens unintentionally, creating a narrative that represents how we think, feel, and speak about a person or group of people or ourselves, a season, an event.
Think about a difficult experience in your life. What parts do you underline and go over time and again? What facial expressions stick with you? What stories do you make up to fill in the gaps of what you don’t know? What is the narrative that endures?
In this moment, you are inevitably making a memory about that difficult experience. As you make this memory, perhaps you feel shame or condemnation, anger or defensiveness, sadness or fear.
Since memories are unavoidably made as you remember, how might you intentionally make your next memory of this experience? Are there other parts of the experience that you could call to mind and underline? Are there other stories you could make up (or investigate) to fill in the gaps of what you don’t know?
I am not inviting us to silver-line or spiritually bypass the harmful things that have happened to us. The hope that I find in Ranganath’s work is that we have the power to expand our memories in ways that help us to take the next good step forward.
Someone I love is going through a romantic break-up right now. As I have walked next to them, we’ve talked about the memories they’re making. There was a story they told themselves about their partner while they were in the relationship. That story helped to frame their love and their future. There is a different story they need to tell right now (a memory they need to make) in order that they might grieve and access the places of anger they hadn’t allowed themselves to access during the increasing precarity of the relationship. And eventually they will form memories that integrate and incorporate all the pieces to tell the story they need to tell in order to heal and to love.
As I prepare to leave the CRCNA, I know that I have a choice about the way I will remember my time in this denomination and the way it ended. I know that I might need a certain kind of narrative in this current aftermath, and another narrative as my perspectives and beliefs change. How will I tell the story to myself? To others? How will I make this memory?
The psalmist helps me when they pray that God would make curated memories of us (Psalm 25:7).
Do not remember the sins of my youth
and my rebellious ways;
according to your love remember me,
for you, Lord, are good.
May I also remember according to love, even as God – in love – remembers me.
[1] All of my quotes are my transcriptions of the audiobook, so my apologies for the lack of page numbers and the guesses and punctuation!
Header Image: by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash
Thanks for this wonderful reflection, Heidi. Truly beautiful for you, your family and our identities. And challenging for the separations and transitions that tug fiercely and reverberate with loss.
Thank you for this timely and lovely word, Heidi. “Help me now, Dear God, to remember according to your love.”
Heidi, thanks for this evocative essay. When I was in grad school at Ohio State University, my letters home were diary entries that I typed each day. My mother saved them, and now I have them. Reading the words and remembering the experiences of my emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth in those years have been gifts that keep on giving. As I grieve the death of my husband, reliving my days before I met Bill, during our courtship, and in our brief separation as I completed my coursework and he began his service in the Army, Bill and I are together again, revived in my memory.
Heidi
Thanks for this moving reflection. And thanks for introducing Ranganath’s book. I will get it and read it after I finish my re-reading of James K. A. Smith’s “How to Inhabit Time.” As you leave, and grieve over, departing the CRCNA, recall Jamie Smith’s point: that the past is not what we leave behind, but what we take with us– and, vitally — reinterpret as we go forward. Or is it “home” we’re headed for, and, like Eliot, know the place for the first time?
Go in God’s peace.
Heidi, having moved my daughter for her first year of Uni this week and also on the cusp of leaving the denom I resonate with so much of what you wrote. Memory making and story telling—both need attending. May we be wise in the stories we tell, stories of truth, hurt, generosity, and love, for they will shape our memories and those of our children.
Beautiful thoughts, Heidi, as always. Part of why I love re-reading favorite books and re-watching favorite movies is that it calls to mind the memories of previous encounters with those stories. I think about how that story spoke to me then and how it speaks to me now. All the more true for the living words of Scripture! Being more aware of that process, it then leads me to wonder, “How will I remember *this* moment and build on it?” (“Stackable” memories, I call them.)
Blessings to dear Samara as she starts building a treasury of college memories. I treasure the memory of meeting her the day she was born!
I’m reading “The Story – How Leaders Harness the Power of Stories to Win in Business”. Similar theme: we’re often only part way through a story when we think it’s already over: and how we tell ourselves our own stories is really important reflection and work. Thanks, and all the best at Queen’s! Bill
Thank you for this beautiful essay. It reminds me of Miroslav Volf’s work in this area, writing about memory in general, but specifically around remembering trauma. He himself was a survivor of torture and wrote beautifully about the ability and need to “remember redemptively.”