Yesterday’s prompt from reverb10:
5 minutes. Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010
Since I’m such a fan of using a timer, how could I not respond to this prompt? But I was feeling resistant to the exercise. I thought it was because I’m not one for poring over the past. I don’t scrapbook, or collect mementos, or even take photographs of “important events.”
Then, after drafting a post and still not hitting publish a day later, I realized why the wording of this post triggered such resistance in me.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year with people who have lost their memory. My mother is in the process of losing hers. What memories she does have access to are from her childhood rather than from her adult career and connections.
I know how fluid, shifting, and evanescent memory can be, even for those of us without neurological decline. I know how futile it is to try to capture memories.
But if I could hope to remember two things from 2010 it would be these:
The feeling I want to remember from 2010 is the love and gratitude I feel for my partner, whose support, patience, and love was essential to my surviving and even thriving over the past year.
The lesson I want to remember from 2010 is that our time here on this plane is short. Why spend it putting things off indefinitely? Why wait for some later, supposedly better moment when you could move forward and take action now?