“People with the ability to retain and remember everything are often blocked. They live in the past and find it difficult to visualize themselves in the future…”
We would all like to go back and change the past with its medley of true and false memories. But the past is not as fixed as we imagine. The future is in flux and the present is the only certainty.
Your head is a broken picture of disconnected puzzle pieces. As old memories grow distant, the person you see in that memory seems to have little or no connection to the person you are now. This is not abnormal. It is healthy.
Memory is elastic. It adapts. We vividly recall what’s important for survival. If you walked on the thin ice of a lake and got soaked when you fell in, you remember that. You remember that fire burns and silent dogs are dangerous.
Memories attached to emotions stay longer in the brain: first love, the sudden death of someone close. The rest is mind dust our brain neurons sweep out while we sleep at night, deleting chunks of information that have become irrelevant.
People with the ability to retain and remember everything are often blocked. They live in the past and find it difficult to visualize themselves in the future.
‘The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ – Albert Einstein.
As time passes, more useless pieces of data are deleted. When you try to remember certain events, fewer details remain and what does remain seems ‘remote’ or belonging to someone else.
The brain then has an insidious urge to reinvent elements that were deleted and paste random images over the gaps, plagiarizing from movies, novels, other people’s stories.
Our experiences, beliefs and values evolve, leading us to view past events through a different lens. This shift creates a sense of detachment from our memories, making recollections feel distant or unfamiliar.
It is clearly a cliché, but our goal should be to live in the present, avoid too much nostalgia and let the future unfold naturally like a flower coming into bloom.
He met actress Carol White in Hollywood and wrote her memoirs, Carol Comes Home. It was the first of a dozen books as a ghostwriter, including the Sunday Times bestseller Today I’m Alice – the story of multiple personality disorder survivor Alice Jamieson. His most recent book, “How to Rob the Bank of England”, published in September 2024.
www.cliffordthurlow.com