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Enjoying a moment or experience is different from imbedding the experience into your memory so that it remains … always. This is probably why we take so many pictures. But even a perfectly aimed photograph cannot guarantee that the moment is going to stick. We need to absorb it into our brain so that we can, upon demand, access it and remember exactly how we felt at that time.
Yet, we seemingly have a hard time doing this because of one simple reason; time. How we feel about something or someone one day, can often be quite different in how we feel about something or someone, the next. And this is not because the something or someone has changed; it’s because we have.
Of course, this is not always true when the feelings we want to absorb are from a loved one’s event. If a child gets married, or graduates from college, or has a baby, we seldom lose our ability to absorb these happy and pride-filled feelings, but when we take an amazing vacation, we have a tendency to lose the individual moments of joy or awe we felt throughout the journey and wrap them together into one general feeling about the trip or location. This happens because one day you are standing atop one of the Alps, looking down on the most picturesque view of a life you have only seen in postcards, and the next day, you are travelling on a train, talking to a former Nobel prize winner. And when you return home and tell others about your experiences, they, in turn, develop their own feelings about what you are relaying, which can (and do) alter your own memories. Six months later, your recollections about your trip are reduced to one conclusion in that it was simply…amazing, losing your ability to differentiate one amazing moment or view from the next.
However, even knowing this, I still try to absorb as many of the meaningful moments I have on a trip as I can. But what I have realized over the years is that it is often the times when something went wrong, that I remember the most. When we miss seeing a famous landmark because we couldn’t find it, didn’t want to wait in a 3-hour line or didn’t know it was closed, I absorb these moments more easily. If I try a food that is unique to a location and it is not to my liking, I remember that moment better than when we had a great meal at a restaurant which came highly recommended. And when we check into a cheap and convenient hotel and find that we can’t close the bathroom door without moving the trash can outside the room, I remember that night more so than the other 5 nights in a comfortable room at the ‘most recommended’ hotel in the area. Perhaps this is due to what our expectations are for the journey or the experience in the first place. We need the experience to be different from what we thought it would be, so that we can create our own indelible memory. Because then, why else would we go?
Soak! Soak!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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