Let it Fade?

                                           

“Memory. It’s the diary that we all carry...with us.” –Oscar Wilde

A memory carries with it the strictest implication of something that in most cases lies exclusively in the past, that we can not ever go back to or experience again. It is as Oscar Wilde puts it, our life’s diary.   

Growing up in rural southwestern New Mexico, my earliest memories are of camping trips to the Gila River, Bill Evans (quite possibly the most desolate lake I have ever visited) and Lake Roberts. I remember floating down the river on inner tubes, later crashing through the water on ATV’s. I remember Bill Evans as the place where I once fell in, and the story about it grew to enormous proportions (I think it’s now to the point where I wrestled a sea snake as my dad and uncle tried to rescue me). I think of Lake Roberts and the time when I did a 360 (read doughnut) in my 1955 Chevy hot rod as I missed the turn off with a buddy that is no longer with us. (I still think of you all the time Mark) Memories; they drive us purposefully to Nostalgia Road, drop us off for a time, but always beckon us back much too soon.    

I was talking to a friend the other day as she was half re-telling half-crying stories from her high school days and “the one that got away.” For homecoming one year, her boyfriend had given her a homecoming sash that she kept for well over 15 years! They had actually broken up well before then, however the sash remained as a memento of a great memory they experienced together and the reason it was finally discarded albeit reluctantly, was due to that fact that it finally started falling apart piece by piece from sheer age.    That’s when it dawned on me; memories are a lot like that huh? We love to play the role of a nostalgic lover, thinking about our glory days; periods when we had the time of our lives. There in that seldom opened room in our mind, among the hanging dust and clatter are special trips with friends, old girlfriends, old boyfriends, buddy’s and people we will never see again, and feelings or emotions that we will never again quite recapture in the severity or vividness we seem to remember them. 

We can ponder those long-ago moments just like the majority of our world, and truth be told, there is nothing wrong with that, but let me throw a wrench into that kind of thinking. What if you chose to live a life full of purpose and intent that woke with the determination to create brilliant and distinct new memories rather than simply run the hamster wheel? I know and you know that life is much too short.  Do we want to spend even a portion of it sipping from a bottle begging the question, “Remember when?” or do we want to rev the engine a little, shout out to our partner or partners “Hop on!” and go make some new ones? I chose to rev the engine today, who wants to ride?     

“There is nothing sadder than a life lost that was lived with an abundance of regrets, and there are times when I wish I would have said yes more, than in which I said no.”

                                                                                                                        -Louis