AHSS The Gift of Years: Memories (Lesson 27)

W. Somerset Maugham wrote, “What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.” What we often fail to realize is that memory is a mental function, yes, but it is also a choice. We do get to decide which of our memories of a particular time, or person or place, or moment may shape our life in the present moment. Memory is one of the most powerful functions of the human mind. It is also one of life’s most determining ones.

What goes on in memory has a great deal to do with what goes on in all our lives. Memory is a wild horse, unbridled, riderless, maverick. It takes us often where we would not go or takes us back over and over again to where we cannot stay, however much we wish we could.  So, it leaves us always in one state or the other, one place or the other, leaving us either pining or confused. It leaves us, in either case, in a world unfinished in us. The unfinishedness is the price we pay for growing always older.

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past of bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. There is an energy in memory that is deceiving. The assumption is that since a thing is past, it has no present meaning for us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever is still in memory is exactly what has the most meaning for us. It gives sure sign of what still has emotional significance for us. It tells us what we did that we now miss doing and reminds us of what we didn’t do that we now wish we had.

Memory is many things. It is a call to resolve in us what simply will not go away. It is an invitation to delight in what is gone but is, too, the gold standard of our lives. It is a desire for completion, for continuance of something we once had but lost too soon. It is always an opportunity for healing. Memory is the one function of the human mind that touches the core of us. It tells us what we miss and what we regret and what we have yet to come to peace with if our lives are ever to be really clear.

Memory holds us in contact with those who went before us. It is not meant to cement us in times past. It is the greatest teacher of them all. The task is to come to the point where we can trust our memories to guide us out or the past into a better future. Memory allows treasured lives to live inside of us. And most of all, perhaps, memory also confronts us with the emotions – the feelings, the fears, the struggles – that reside in us yet as unfinished questions and unresolved pain and unfinished joys. They become a blueprint for tomorrow that shows us out of our own experience how to live, how to love, how to forget, how to go on again. Memories are the happy remembrance of possibilities still to be sought, or the now meaningful recall of things yet to be completed.  

Sister Joan Says: A burden of memory in these years is to allow it to meld us into the company of people, time, and places long on by. A blessing of these years is to realize that our memories of both the sad and the happy, the exciting and the secure, the successes and the failures of life are meant to guide us down these last roads with confidence – the confidence that having negotiated the demands of the past we may safely walk into the future.

1. “Without memory we could go blithely on in life without ever really knowing what of that life was still unfinished, was still rumbling around inside of us, waiting for attention.” So says Sister Joan. Can you remember what is still unfinished, still rumbling around inside, still waiting for attention in your life? Write an anonymous column about one or more of these and share it with someone you trust.