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The way we think influences the contents we speak of. Some people may prefer their life colors remain in varying shades of grey. But there are times in lives we stand at the watershed between truth and untruth and need to make a clearly demarcated decision.
A current news event has stirred up my memory of a story I read sometime ago about a young woman uncovering her unmarried aunt’s reason for remaining single. She still could not forget her first love from junior high school. She did not marry him because she was ambitious and felt that he could not possibly give her the financial freedom she yearned for. They separated and lost contact for decades. She became a famous commercial artist in her own right. The young niece did some sleuthing and finally tracked down the man in question. He turned out to be a very successful but reclusive industrialist manufacturing highly sought after exquisite glassware. He had married, divorced and remained single. He soon detected this young girl stalking him and confronted her. Here is the anti-climax: when she told him she was trying to reconcile him with her aunt, he categorically denied having ever known her aunt!
What really happened? The girl was disappointed and puzzled. The aunt told her the name of her first love and this man bore that name. But this man had no idea who the aunt was and denied ever loving any woman of that description. The girl finally found and showed him the faded photo of her aunt and her young lover from high school. It dawned on the industrialist that the young man was his classmate and good friend then. Apparently the aunt remembered a wrong name. The girl was shocked. All these years the aunt was stalking/thinking of the wrong man when she kept abreast of news about his development and achievements in life.
But what happened to the other man? The undistinguished real lover? The girl eventually found him, an ordinary man at his death bed in a hospice. He had married, propagated, widowed, retired and lived with his grown-up son and family. He thought she was her aunt because of the resemblance. In the story she let this poor man hold her hand until he breathed his last.
I know my memory cannot be classified as totally objective, factual, accurately organized and stored like untempered computer data. I used to think otherwise. But one day my younger sister unknowingly challenged the accuracy of my facts. I overheard her recalling a historical family incident to our younger relatives. I remember everything just as she narrated except for one crucial fact. In my memory I was the hero who did that act of charity. In her narration she became that charitable person! How can that be? I was stunned. I stayed silent. Either one of us has to be wrong. Who is it? She is an honest person. I know that as a fact. So am I. But one of us remembers an untruth.
What affects my memory? How do I remember things? I use ways to memorize different details, often by associations which are not entirely reliable. Despite being a very careful reader of maps, when I am driving in a less familiar terrain (and without GPS), suddenly realizing that some familiar landmarks have changed without my previous noticing, I would find myself stopping my car in the middle of the road, pulling aside to figure out where I am on the map, because I cannot rely on my internalized auto-pilot system anymore.
I personally find that faces, names and places are the most difficult items to synchronize when recalling. Often I have to put memory pieces like jigsaw puzzles (real and imagined?) together to form a coherent (in my thinking) narrative picture. Association can be misleading and deceptive too like the story above of the two young men and their names being mixed up in the memory of a young girl.
Being fond of writing and reading words, I realize that my thinking formulates pictures the way I see them in my mind which is in turn influenced by many variable factors, some real, some unintentionally and often unconsciously creatively imagined. After awhile, I even speak as if they are real. I am thankful that I have a family and loved ones with enough common sense and who are not afraid to point out where I err in this memory-recalling processing task.
What matters is how God sees us. Knowing how He sees me and aligning with His view will be the best guide for every aspect of life. What about memory? Leave it aside unless it fits the following happy thoughts.
So keep your (my) thoughts continually fixed on all that is authentic and real, honorable and admirable, beautiful and respectful, pure and holy, merciful and kind. And fasten your (my) thoughts on every glorious work of God, praising Him always. (Philippians 4:8)
