Revisiting a Stream

Yesterday evening I found myself revisiting a random assemblage of childhood memories. They arrived with no real theme or anything to tie them together. They had no reason to present themselves at all, really. I must have unwittingly removed a filter that hid them.

One such memory was of lounging at a neighborhood swimming pool on a peak summer day and eating pizza (I was about 12), while swatting away the North Carolina horseflies. Another was of a final high school trip to a comedy club with my classmates after graduation. It was the last time I ever saw many of them.

I often think that as years pass, there becomes less and less to tie me to my own memories. Cells change, die, and are replaced. I am less of who I was yesterday than who I was ten minutes ago, never mind ten years ago. And the person 20 years ago who experienced these events now seems to exist only in these fragmented scenes that sometimes play, in kaleidoscopic fashion, in my mind.

I think that as nostalgic as I can be for the naivety of adolescence, even returning to these places I once lived would not elicit the same feelings. Rick Rubin describes it in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being like this: you cannot really cross the same stream twice because the water is always different. Similarly, the place is different, the people are different, and I am different.

These thoughts lead me to believe that it would be nice if our minds could absorb every minute of every scene we experience, and maintain that memory permanently. But the mind has limited RAM; it lets go of things that it arguably shouldn’t. As the mind ages, it does the opposite of what we wish: it loses much of the past when we wish to maintain all of it. And the older the memory, the weaker the circuitry in the program that is the self. We need photos or videos to evoke the feelings we had, and even then we can only experience some diluted version of the memory.

It is tragic, and yet it also heightens the importance of fully absorbing the present moment. Now can only be experienced once.