The Empty Mind

Has anybody ever told you that you should "stop living in the past"? Or that you should stop "dwelling on the past"? Wouldn't it be so much easier if you couldn't remember the past? If we weren't meant to relive the past, then why do we still remember them in our heads? Why should we keep memories at all?

Imagine a world in which nostalgia didn't exist because the memories of our earlier days were never retained. Would we be better off?

No, I'm not talking about short-term memory loss like in the movie Memento. I'm talking about specific events of the past that you re-play in your head 10 years after the fact. The ones that stick out like a sore thumb, the ones that are re-lived vividly everytime they come up as if you were there. But what for? Why do we re-live those moments if we know we can never live them again? Why do they stick out in our minds so clearly as if it happened yesterday?

I'll give you an example. It was my freshman year of high school and it was the 2nd to last game of the basketball season. We were playing Christiana, the score was 42-39, Christiana. There was about 6 seconds left in the 4th quarter. I had already missed an easy layup in the game and I was benched for most of the 4th quarter, but I was the best shooter on the team, they needed me for the last shot. The inbounds pass was by our end, so my teammate throws it down court, fortunately coming to me. I caught the ball right at the 3 point line, but instead of shooting a 3, I drive it to the hoop. The other team gives me a free shot, knowing that a layup will not hurt them, but I miss it anyways. Had I made my 2 layups, we would have won the game. But then again, that goes back to the "What if?" question I ask in my last post, and I have come to the conclusion that it just wasn't meant to be. But why do I still think about that specific moment to this day? It's so relatively meaningless. So many other things happened to me that year that was much more important, my first time living away from home at summer college, my first kiss, my transfer to Charter from Concord, my first year back in the states, my first marriage (hahaha). Why some stupid high school basketball game?

Consequently, that was also the first year I learned to speak my mind via pen and paper, and now look what its transformed to.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

-E.A Poe "Dream within a Dream"