Addiction

All of the methods I have been using to remember every day that passes remain true.

Reviewing the memory tags pinned to my mental calendar reinforces them. I am still running a two-day window over each week starting from two years ago (I have a lot of blanks until I reach 17 December 2011 - the day I began this process). For the last month, I go through every day.

If an image is elusive, I can find it by running through the images for surrounding days.

There are no plot holes - events must happen in order. This also helps me when I get lost.

Having a theme for a week or sequence of days is a short cut to recalling them.

Visualising the layout of the calendar in my mind's eye helps me to orientate myself and move from date to date.

Generally I run through the review as I am waking up, but sometimes this is not possible.

And so I realise I am addicted.

I have to complete the review before I go to sleep again. I find I can pick up where I left off easily enough during the day.

If I fail to complete the review, which has happened a few times, the next day I will cover three days per week for the missing period, or even run through the full sequence of days.

What also continues to be true is this process gives me a grounding sense of perspective and balance, which makes the effort worthwhile.

Though it uses mental space, it does not dominate my day, but gives me something to fill odd moments - and though I am addicted to the reviews, I rarely obsess over events or thoughts as I might have done in the past as they fit into the broader perspective.

Moving through the world

I have just spent some time in the city where my office is based.

We lived here for most of last year and I posted a blog on 8 February 2012 about how when I return to a place it becomes familiar as if I had never been away, while other places fade - until I visit those once more.

It struck me on this visit that this is no longer the case.

In my daily reviews of the images pinned to my mental calendar I check in on most of the places and people I have visited over the past 18 months (depending which days of the week I cover).

This gives me a sense of them continuing without me, of friends and family getting on with their lives.

When we made a weekend trip to visit friends, they had been in my thoughts virtually every day since we had last met as they appeared in different memory tags.

It makes the obvious clearer: although my viewpoint is always where I stand, I am a traveller moving through the world.

Where I stopped

Sometimes I wake up and have to get up.

I don't have time for my morning review of past days.

And so I try to fit in the review during free mental time I might have.

Today is Saturday, so I review all Friday and Saturday tags. The last time I will have reviewed Saturday tags, will have been last Sunday, that is six days ago.

If I have to break off this process, I now find it quite easy to pick up where I left off.

There is a difference between a tag already recalled once today and one recalled six days ago.


At the moment this is not a concern, because I haven't lost any tags.

But it may be telling me something about how memories fade as the time between reviews lengthens.

Remembering backwards

My daily reviews of a portion of the tags on my mental calendar now stretches back two years, prior to the time I began this process of remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

I recall two days per week by reviewing the images I have pinned to those days. If they exist. Which is rare until I hit the magic date. From then on, I have images for every day.

While I have come up with images for some key dates in the mainly blank months - such as weddings, travel, birthdays - generally I have to make do with registering the date for the days of the week I am reviewing and recalling something significant for the month as a whole to at least have some idea of where I was and what was going on in my life.

I am finding some value in doing this, but it markedly different from the richness when my calendar is fully populated.

But there seems little point in trying to fill in all of the blanks.

Here's why.

Today is 31 May and a year ago I know I visited a shopping mall to meet up with a friend. I have an memory tag for the day. An image may be quite inconsequential - sitting with my friend at the mall - but it contains a great deal of information, fixing the day in time and place.

The year before, 31 May 2011, was a Tuesday. I know I was in my wife's country and we were probably staying in our flat at the time, though I cannot be certain.

Perhaps if I trawled through credit card records I could work out we had visited a particular café, which I might remember and might be able to turn that into a memory tag.

It may be defeatist, but I feel it is not worth that effort. It's not the tags that are important, but how they orientate me.

The best of me

The only true defence is love.

I realised this half a lifetime ago.

In my relationships with others, I invariably feel diminished when I act out of anger or selfishness.

I can only really bear the spotlight of self analysis if the motivation for my actions is love.

Living on that basis is a far harder prospect.

But this process of remembering every day that passes helps. There are times where an argument or falling out casts a shadow over a day or period of days. There are others where in difficult circumstances I have managed to put aside my own hurt or demands and shown the best of me.

In my morning reviews, particularly when under stress, I greet the person I can sometimes be like my saviour and try to wear that skin through the day ahead.

Driving posture

I have been doing some long distant driving over the past few days and have found this is a useful way to readjust my posture.

Through the General Postural Reeducation exercises I have been doing regularly, my head is coming into the correct position and I feel the point of pressure where I am adjusting the forward curvature of my spine is moving further down my back.

Sitting in the car, it is possible to keep up this pressure for hours. As with running, over time the muscles around my spine relax, bringing it more into the correct position.

Towards the ends of my journeys, the discomfort in keeping my head in the correct position had just about gone.

Tipping point

My memory tag for 28 April 2013 is a run in the park and reaching a tipping point in my Global Postural Reeducation experiment.

I guess it comes down to geometry.

I have been doing exercises to stop my head projecting, stretching the muscles of my neck so my spine is a little more vertical over my body. This picture on the Dr Sam Tocco site shows it well.

My head needs to move from the poor posture on the right to the vertical posture on the left.

If my neck and the muscles surrounding it are the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, with the base being the vertical line I am aiming for, the change required in its length as it approaches vertical becomes less the closer to vertical it is. In other words, less stretch is needed as vertical is approached, until the hypotenuse and the base coincide.

I noticed this when running on 28 April 2013 - it is my memory tag for that day. I find I loosen up after a few kilometres and on this day it meant my neck could assume the vertical position without straining against resisting muscles. It felt like a weight off my shoulders!

Not only did I no longer have to force my head back to achieve vertical, I had the flexibility to overshoot. In fact, if I wanted I could arch my spine with my belly or chest projecting instead of my head. I felt free, able to choose the posture to bring my body into balance.

As I slipped into this equilibrium position my point of visual focus suddenly extended into the distance. With my head no longer jumping around, I had a stable platform to look from.

Fixing on the path in the distance, externalised my viewpoint.

Suddenly I remembered how it felt to run 20 years ago, with my trunk virtually immobile as my legs did the running. The roll of my shoulders also disappeared; my arms just pumped back and forth. I was a running machine.

It felt so liberating.

I thought I will remember this moment for ever by making it my memory tag for today.