Across the years

In my last post I wrote about pros and cons of my current method for refreshing older memory tags pinned to my mental calendar. The method has changed over time. Currently I recall images for a two-week block of days from each month since I began this process of remembering every day that passes. I don't spend long doing this, just covering several months of my calendar every day.

This gradual progression over the five years I have filled since beginning this process rarely reminds me of what I was doing a year ago as the dates don't coincide. So I have missed birthdays.

The solution is a simple change to my morning review of more recent days. This review passes a two-day window over every week of my calendar for the past six months. To finish, I review the images for every day of the past month.

The change I have made is to add a short review, recalling the images on the same date from when I began this process over five years ago.

In fact, I'm doing this as a two-day window to benefit from the association between adjacent days. So today being February 22, I have recalled the images for the 22nd and 23rd of each month. If there is a birthday tomorrow, I'll remember.

Navigating my mental calendar is now a familiar exercise, so it is easy to locate the day of the week on which these dates fall. Today is Wednesday, February 22, 2012 was also Wednesday. I already recalled the image in yesterday's review so it is familiar to me. A conversation with a particular friend. The image for the next day comes easily to mind – I have been reviewing this sequence for five years, after all. A bike ride.

And so to February 22, 2013. I know this is a Friday (the patterns are clear to me). The image tag is the sound of the security chain running through my cycle helmet as I lock up a different bike in a different city on a different continent. The next day the tag is a particularly important conversation with my wife.

February 22, 2014. A Saturday (the progression is one day when it is not a leap year). It takes a moment to orientate myself on this day. I need a sense of the year. Where I was. What was the theme of this part of the year. When it doesn't come to me instantly, a quick scan of nearby days reminds me, and I know this was a day I had my haircut with my 80-year-old barber in the city I was in at that time and then took the car I had borrowed to check the tyres and oil. The next day's tag is driving to my sister-in-law's to return her car.

February 22, 2015. Sunday, obviously. This part of the year is marked by the illness of a relative. I was visiting and on this day, after a cross-country run in the morning, other relatives dropped by. I left for the city I was working the same day. The tag for Monday comes to mind because it is also about running, this time in a forest near to where I was staying. My landlady's daughter called by when we were chatting in the kitchen, on a run of her own. I learned of a nearby nature reserve for the first time, despite living on and off for over 20 years. My memory tag for the next day is running to visit it.

This was two years ago and I am shocked it is not more recent.

February 22, 2016. Monday, of course. I'm still not fully used to the idea that 2016 is now history set in stone.

The hardest tags to remember were those from 2016. In fact, the tag for February 22 eluded me yesterday. I had to stop worrying at them and let it float into my mind today. It did so while I was having my hair cut (tag for today!). On February 22, 2016 my wife and I went for breakfast in a café we had not visited for some time. She forgot her sunglasses, so I ran there on February 23 to collect them.

This journey across the years is a new addition to my refresh technique and the fabric of my mind is still flexing under its impact on my perceptions of the passage of time.

If I had not begun this Lembransation process, these years would be as indistinct now as those that lay further in the past. The memory tags can transport me back, but sometimes the tag is all I remember. It is really a proxy for the memories of the day. My mind has otherwise let it go, it seems, as with so many of the earlier days in my nearly 52 years.

And yet... this flexing of my mind feels like exercising a new muscle, perhaps strengthening abilities to be able to step into the image and relive the moment, exploring from there. This has happened unexpectedly a couple of times already.

There is a philosophical aspect to this as yet unclear. The person I was five years ago is not the person I am now. I travel back not only through time and space, but through the layers that construct me. I'm not a stranger to myself, but the younger version is different.

On the monthly cycle of these visits across the years, I see my younger self recede, yet it is my present self that is moving forward.

End date

The death of David Bowie 18 months after he was diagnosed with cancer - and the way he used that time creatively - made me think how I would spend my last months in a similar situation.

This prompted me to start an experiment as I can clearly visualise the period of 18 months thanks to this process of remembering every day that passes. I'm imagining that my time runs out half way through next year.
http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/01/mortality.html

Of course, I don't really believe it will happen so there is an artificiality about the exercise. But when I refresh the memory tags from 18 months ago, I tell myself this is how long I would have. That is the stretch of time to fill.

I am trying to value the days as if they are my last. Spending a bit more time with people I love - and giving them more attention when we are together. Being more cheerful with shop assistants and waiting staff. Doing - or planning to do during the next 18 months - some of the things I've always intended.

This would be my last full year to fill and I'm already approaching the end of the first month. I look to the right and there is the end date I have selected for this experiment.

Something happened today as I ran my refresh technique, recalling two images per month from January 2014 (days 27 and 28 of the month - see the refresh technique link under "about me" for details).

First the years lost their anchor. I've always felt the current year is centrally placed in my mental landscape. I step onto the calendars to my left to go to earlier years. This can be a little disorientating at the turn of the year when everything moves (read about that here). As I've started looking to my notional end date in this experiment, I suddenly thought this calendar is the whole of my life. And it lost its anchor, became detached, floating beneath me as I floated above it in my mind's eye.

Then I thought that my real end date was somewhere there. I couldn't know where the memory tags would stop and I would leave no further mark, but somewhere down there on those months was the transition.

Then it struck me that time would end for me.

My calendar would end. It does not stretch forever to my right, but at the end date, there is no more calendar.

I know the sun will continue to rise after I have gone. There will be people who remember me, at least for a while. But I won't be there.

If I am somewhere, then there is infinity ahead of me and time would lose its meaning - as Amazing Graces says with proper understanding of infinity, "We've no less days to sing God's praise than when we've first begun." Everyone I know, the solar system, the universe itself would pass away. For that to be bearable, the new experience would truly have to be amazing - or how could it be grace and not torture? Days could no longer exist. This life would surely fade into a different perspective, a brief flicker, a different reality, a dream that has passed.  

With that it felt like my calendar was floating in a void, with me far above it. There was my beginning and my end and that was all there was.

This is all obvious, of course. These are the days of our life and we should live them to the full.

Now I have felt it in a new way, thanks to this process and this experiment. It feels profound, but it is still a new feeling and I still have to learn the lessons it brings.

Mortality

I had already pre-ordered David Bowie's new album Blackstar and had it waiting on my phone when the same phone flashed up the news he had died. His music was the soundtrack to my teenage years: I bought the albums I had missed then everything he released. He was one of the few major artists I ventured to see in concert.

I've listened to Blackstar now and watched the video. It was released on Bowie's birthday, 8 January. He passed away two days later and the world learned the shock news the day after.

Tony Visconti, long-time producer of Bowie albums said, "He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was not different from his life — a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift."

Not only that, a theatre work called Lazarus, co-written by Bowie and featuring his music, opened in New York in December.

It seems Bowie was planning more recording, but was interrupted.

His cancer was diagnosed 18 months before. Strangely, my last post here, just a few hours before the news reached me, I called "Almost a sense of mourning", about how with the turn of the year my mental calendar shuffles to the left. Images that were "this year" are now last year. "Last year" slips away to be a more distant completed page.

These pages now stretch back, covered in images, to when I began this process of remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

What struck me is how clearly I can now see 18 months. Standing on my mental calendar, I look to the right and there is the spot to step on to. That's how many days I would have.

A niece, my wife's sister's daughter, died of cancer a little over a year after it was diagnosed. Those key dates are in the images on my calendar, together with the days when I saw her. It is a way to never forget someone.

I don't know how and when I will die, just that somewhere in the pages to my right, there is an end.

Maybe there will be a diagnosis and time to prepare. Maybe it will simply be a day that began as any other.

When I was a young man at college, having my horizon's expanded, for a while I thought it clever to say that we are all terminal cases really and should live every day as if it could be our last - though not as if it is going to be.

I can see 18 months now. I can walk over the days that have not yet been filled. As an experiment, I am imagining they are all I have left. What difference will this perspective make to how I live them?

Visualisation and memory

I ran a half marathon on 30 August 2015.

In preparation, I watched a video clip someone had posted of the route. This enabled me to think about how I would approach the run to pace myself, particularly with there being a long uphill section at the outset and the prospect of slower runners to overtake.

On the day of the race, I told myself to enjoy it. This was the race for real, not the visualisation.

It struck me that the memory I would be left with would be very similar to the visualisation, if everything went to plan.

Of course, the memory has real moments that I could not have imagined: the runner dressed as spiderman, the spectator who thought it hilarious to shout 'take your feet of the brakes' as the runners streamed past, the extreme weather during the last 5 km.

But much of what I recall of the race could just as well be from the visualisation. My memory tag is stopping at a prearranged point along the route for a photo with my wife. That image was already in my visualisation.

Visualisation and memory are both proxies.

The reality was the experience.

I have my next race already booked.

History

I've commented before that I often find it harder to recall the memory tags for recent days than for days long gone.

This has been particularly true this week, for two conflicting reasons. On the one hand, the days are similar in routine and location. On the other hand, there have been some significant developments in resolving some personal issues through discussions with my wife.

Information has filled my mind and it has made it difficult to separate out what happened on one day rather than another.

Only as the week has reached its end have I been able to construct the images to capture each day, attaching the progress towards a resolution of the issues my wife and I have been discussing to the subtly different landmarks of time and place.

I am reminded that life is lived going forwards, but understood looking backwards.

What we choose to remember is, to some extent, dependent on the story we tell of our own lives. This is undoubtedly even more true in following this process of remembering, where I construct an image for each day to capture the essential facts I want to keep forever: I consciously choose those facts.

Newspapers have been described as "The first draft of history".

I didn't quite understand this when first I heard it. It seemed to me that news written at the time would be superior to someone from the future looking back on events with only partial details to piece together a story. But I came to understand that history needs to be pieced together and interpreted. The news stories for a particular day may only provide glimpses of a greater picture that comes to view with a little distance.

So it is has been this week. Each day a piece of the puzzle emerged to slot together by the week's end.

Happy New Year

New Year's Eve should be an easy landmark to remember, but there are surprisingly few I can pin down with any degree of certainty.

Without any effort I have been able to recall the past four New Years. I know where I was at the turn of the Millennium and I'm pretty sure of the year I was on Copacabana beach in Brazil.

When I was in High School and home from college there was a party, usually where my friends and I went to drink. I have vague memories of my parents' parties when I was a child, mixed in with watching some TV programme when there was no party.

My memory of New Years covers nearly half a century. Mobile phones disappear as I venture back, as do ATM machines. The Berlin Wall returns along with the Cold War. DVDs turn to VHS tapes, our television fades to back to black and white. Our front-loading washing machine vanishes. Fruit and vegetables becomes seasonal and we wrap apples in newspaper and store them in the dark for the winter. There are rumours that the Beatles will reform - they broke up when I was five years old.

I now have nearly 400 images pinned to my internal calendar, stretching back day by day into 2011. In idle moments, I will sometimes take a trip through the past year by recalling the image for the same day of each month. This takes just 12 images and as the sequence depends on the date and is always building, it is usually fascinating.

Applying the same technique to recalling New Year's Eves only, I could jump back to being 5 years old in 42 images (if I had stored them). If I had been born a little earlier, I would have the 50 images required to cover half a century. Double that and we are back to the early days of flight, the lull before the storm of the First World War, radio and film as the new forms of entertainment. Women without the vote and no access to reliable contraception. The past is such a foreign country a little over twice my lifetime ago. Just one hundred images of New Years.

Add the same again and two hundred years ago trains and steam power are the new innovations. A century before and canals and horse-drawn barges are the transport system that powers the industrial revolution in Europe. If I could look back as many New Years Eves as I have remembered sequential days, I would be in a world where evolution had not yet been proposed and, in the Western world, God, the devil, spirits and demons controlled events on an Earth the most learned scholars state with certainty is just 6,000 years old.

Rolling back the calendar more quickly through as many New Years as I will see days in my life and I see civilisations explode then shrink, the pyramids deconstructed.

Further back still and I see our ancestors returning to Africa and decreasing in number until the first homo sapien is born to parents who are somewhat different.

Back further to a more hostile world with creatures only capable of shaping it consciously in limited ways, but whose respiration changes the atmosphere, whose bodies settle on ocean floors to give rise to chalk cliffs, whose swampy vegetation will create seas of petroleum millions of years in the future.

Back to when a splashing wave deposits a few cells on a rock where they dry in the sun and survive to reproduce. This has happened many time before, but the cells deposited in countless splashes over millions of years shrivelled up and died in the sun. Only now when the right cells splash onto the right rock at the right moment does life reach dry land.

Billions of years back now to the deep past and an ocean that is a chemical soup. Within it some of the molecules are very special. They grow and split, attracting other chemicals to protect them. Further back and they are less complex and fewer in number until there is the first - perhaps formed at a deep sea hydrothermal vent. A molecule formed by chance or divine will, to act as the seed to transform the Earth and assemble some of its atoms into increasingly complex structures that will populate every habitat and ultimately gain self-awareness, the ability to think, to reason, to remember and to write blogs.

Perhaps three billion New Years ago the sequence of days leading to the days to which I am witness began.

Days of future passed

The title, of course, alludes to an album by the Moody Blues. I bought it half a lifetime ago. It has their most famous song: Nights in White Satin.

Looking back over the nearly 11 months spent in my country gives me the strong sense of future days passing.

There was so much we had planned to do that has now been done.

People we have visited. Vacations we have taken. Our visit to the Olympics and Paralympics in London. A trip with my parents. A series of work events: planned, delivered, history.

There have been surprises, of course. Unexpected pleasures, as well as problems to be handled.

I try to keep feeling the wonder and gratitude for each new day.

But sometimes in my reviews of long-planned days that are now in the past, I am unsettled by the knowledge that my internal calendar stretches both forwards and back. As I stand on each day that is today, I am just filling in the details.

Which reminds me of something written by Thomas Hardy in one of his novels.

We mark the day of our birth each passing year. But, unbeknown to us, each year we also pass the date of our future death. So best not to be complacent.

Every day is a gift and one day will be my last on this Earth.

Turning the pages

Something remembering every day that passes bring home to me is just that - they all pass.

It would be possible to conceive of my life story as turning the pages of the future into the past.

I exist is on the page that is the present.

There are things to face in the future that I would rather avoid. Big things like the deaths of loved ones, smaller ones, like an ordeal I have coming up for work on 19 April.

However, difficult they may be, they will pass. Until the book of my life is closed.

Eight days a week

I find it useful to think back to what I was doing this day in previous weeks, until I began this process of remembering every day that passes.

A week is a useful period of time, but it is the one aspect of the calendar that is totally arbitrary.

A year is given by the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun - and before the earth's orbit was understood, it was given by the cycle of seasons that results.

A month is given by the time it takes the moon to complete the passage of its phases, linked to its orbit of the earth.

A day is given by the time it takes the earth to revolve once on its own axis.

All were observable by all cultures.

But a week is not set in the heavens, though it is set in the old testament of the Bible of Christians and Torah of Jews.

Other civilisations have used other lengths for the cycle between a day and a month, from four to ten days, apparently.

Seven days almost fits into a lunar month four times, but not precisely enough to be a realistic explanation of its origin.

It may have more to do with our capacity to remember sets of data, which has been said to have a natural limit of seven - though plus or minus two according to some research.

The Beatles sang of eight days a week as cramming in more love than a week normally allows, but there is no clear reason why the week is not eight days. It was in ancient Rome under the nundinal system, until Emperor Constantine adopted the biblical seven days.

Mind rebelling

I am wondering why this process of remembering every day that passes has hit a wall.

Is my mind rebelling from remembering because doing so reminds me of my mortality?

I am repeatedly struck in my reviews of the days since I began this process nearly three months ago how relentless the flow of time is.

As the great philosopher Ozzy Osbourne once sang: "Today was tomorrow yesterday.  It's funny how the time can slip away."

Is forgetting most days once they are done - as I did until so recently - part of our survival mechanism?

Focus on the present and the choice memories of the past, but not every day as it slips through my fingers. Is that it?


Knowing where I was last week, last month and a growing sense of the years before is a reminder that now is a point an a timeline where in the future vitality will be increasingly lost and in the past opportunities have gone forever.

I will never have a child. My friend David is a little older than I am and his daughter is five weeks old tomorrow. I married late and the few short years where it may have happened have gone. With the birth of David and Sandra's Laura, being childless, which I accepted, is now a much starker reality.

Looking back, I do not regret the decisions that have led me here. Indeed, if I had followed a different path I would have been married and started a family in my twenties. I could have children now at university, probably a divorce and perhaps years of regret.

I would certainly not have lived the life I have. And there are many opportunities I did take that have not only given me memories, but made me the person I am today, with the skills, knowledge and, to some degree, wisdom.

But can I face remembering it all? Is my mind rebelling because we are supposed not to?

Dying every day

If we are the sum of our experiences, then the person I am now is different to the person I was yesterday.

I can look back, day by day, to when I began this process of remembering, like a clock winding backwards.

Further back, the dates are more likely to be blank than filled with memories.

But I see myself growing younger, becoming a child. My loved ones rejuvenating.

Those days are gone. Those people changed.

Every day I die and become a new person in adding a layer of experience.

Older and, if I learn from my mistakes, perhaps wiser.

No plot holes

There are no plot holes in life.

I may not understand why something happened. I might jump to the wrong conclusions. But, in theory at least, the more I know and the more I am able to remember, the more sense it will make, not less.

Unlike, say, the US series Heroes. One of my favourites. I could suspend disbelief to accept that people had the ability to fly or walk through walls. But not that an eclipse of the sun drags on for a whole episode and sends a continent into gloom. Fine that a telepath can make Nathan see a deceased character who could heal, but the illusion couldn't cure Nathan of his terrible burns, otherwise the telepath would have used the powers at other times. As time passes the holes puncture the fabric of the story so it can no longer sustain.

Life can be stranger than fiction; I've experienced coincidences that would be too far-fetched even for Hollywood. But certain rules are unbreakable. For example, I cannot be in two places at once. If my recollection of events requires me to have travelled on my bicycle at the speed of sound, I can be sure that there is something wrong with my memory. I have not turned into Jack Bauer from the US series 24.

In this process of remembering every day, continuity not only matters, it comes to my aid.

The Thursday when the sun shone gloriously as I cycled home mid-afternoon and a flock of white birds settled in the field by the river filled the air with sound has to be 26 January. It cannot be 2 February, because the river was frozen that day. So 2 February must be the Thursday when it was bitterly cold.

In reality, filling in the gaps completes the picture. Sadly sometimes with fiction, the more complete the picture, the more visible the holes.

Remembering the future

We moved into our flat on 29 December 2011. Since it was after I began this process of remembering every day of my life I can say, "Ah yes. I remember it well!"

It is a great flat, but things did not get off to a good start as we both found we were allergic to it. After a couple of hours our noses were blocked up and eyes sore. My wife is more sensitive than I and I had to assure her we would either solve the problem or move out without much delay.

After cleaning carpets and walls, changing a curtain and not using a particular radiator that seems to have been painted with something it shouldn't, it is fine and we are able to enjoy it.


I become very practical in situations like this, thinking about what needs to be done and getting on and doing it. I visualise how things should be and try to make it happen.

I thought of us being settled and the teething problems a memory and an experience to relate to friends. And now we are living that future.

A while ago I found a diary written during a dark time in my life.

In amongst the despair are drops of hope saying, the sun is shining outside, life is a miracle and one day things will be better. And they were.

Of course, there are bad days to come too. Every life ends in death. And as Queen Elizabeth II said at a memorial service to September 11th, grief is the price we pay for love.

Every day will pass. So I try to enjoy what is good and bear what has to be borne in that knowledge.

Ask Mum and Dad

I choose the memory tags pinned to my mental calendar. What I want to be sure to carry with me through the rest of my life.

For Wednesday 8 February the image is speaking on the phone to my parents on the way to the pharmacy to buy throat sweets for my wife. She had virtually lost her voice, brought low by the cold weather. When she was last ill like this we were at my parents and my father gave her some throat sweets she found particularly helpful. But we could not remember the name.

They were out when I first called, so I tried again on the way to the pharmacy. They have two phones so are both on the line together. After a quick chat about their day out, I asked asked the sweets and immediately they told me the name. I explained the situation and promised to call them later.

This conversation is my memory tag for this day. But not because I want to remember the name of the sweets.

My parents are in their seventies. My maternal granparents lived into their nineties, but I never met my paternal ones. My father has already outlived his father by more than fifteen years.

Although they have always been there, I know that - if I don't go first - there will be times in the future when I want to call or visit and they are there no longer.

It may be for a forgotten recipe or simply because I miss them.

Then I will remember this and other days and be glad I appreciated them at the time.

Here we are again

It is starting to feel like home again, this city we have moved back to having lived here just over four years ago.

Our town in my wife's country was as familiar when we left two months ago. We had lived there for extended periods since marrying in 2001. Whenever we were there, it seemed like we had never been away. Now we have moved back here, the feeling is the same. It is like wherever here is normal and the memory of being abroad the aberration.

This apparent continuity of punctuated experiences has struck me before. Switching between different places or ways of being. For example, being part of a couple when I visited my girlfriend before we married and being alone when I returned home. There was the same feeling of recognition, of here I am again.

Before then, the was the more dramatic switch between being in a relationship and being single when it ended and on the lookout for another. Returning to a single life was like slowly putting on a familiar set of clothes that had been packed away.

A more marked change of mental state comes from my early twenties when I smoked marijuana with friends if it was around. Returning to the warm familiarity of being stoned, we would often say to each other, "Here we are again". It messed my head up in the end. The state I returned to stopped being joyful and insightful and became unhappy and paranoid. That is now half a lifetime ago.

These experiences support the theory that being in the same location or state of mind helps when it comes to reclaiming linked memories. That's why police will reconstruct a victim's last movements; similar scenes bring to mind forgotten details.

It is also why I have heard it said drinking alcohol (or smoking a joint) when revising for exams is not a good idea. You need the same state of intoxication to most optimally recall the information memorised.

Which brings to mind a story from the ancient university of Oxford in England.

A student turned up for an examination having carefully read the university statutes. "I demand my quart of ale," the student told the invigilator. Sure enough, there was a rule from the 16th century saying students had the right to such refreshment while taking their exams. Being sticklers for the rules, it was duly provided.

The student felt very smug by the time the exam was over. The paper had gone well and the two pints of beer brought a warm glow.

However, the stony faced invigilator had something to say on the way out: "I have been checking the statutes myself and I am sorry but I have to tell you that you have failed the exam."

"Why?" asked the student.

"Because you were not wearing your sword."

Preserve your memories

Sunday was a very full day with much to remember.

I have a theory, founded on not very much at all having only been following this process of remembering every day of my life for less than two months. The theory is that each day should have just one memory tag image pinned to my mental calendar, two at most.

The image has to be selected with care to call up the other things I wish to remember for that day.

For Sunday 5 February 2012 it is of my wife outside a building next to the river, wrapped up against the snow, with a packet in her hands.

I will review this picture for the next ten days, the period I look back over daily to solidify the memories.

At some other point each day, I also review the same day of the week for the last few months - flipping back through every Monday, for example (I've been able to pin down some memory tags for dates before I began this process).

If I have the time and inclination, I also flip back through the years. So today I will try to remember where I was each 6 February as far back as I have the time and inclination to go. It may be that all I can recall will be as vague as which town I must have been living in.

Since starting this process, I have concrete images pinned to each date. Forever more, the image for 5 February 2012 will be that of my wife.

From this, I know it was a day we walked past the river in the snow to arrive at the building in the background.

I will either remember, or work out from the tag from the previous day, that this was a new snowfall.

So I will remember that a multitude of snowmen and women had sprung up that morning in the fields and we took a picture by one that stood over 3 metres tall.

The building is an industrial museum. The packet in my wife's gloved hands contains the guide book we bought, for this was the day we finally visited the museum after walking past it many times.

I will remember that it was not yet open when we arrived. We had to fill the time. What did we do? We carried on to a favourite café for lunch.

The museum is memorable enough to be able to visualise the steam engines inside it working just by thinking about it.

My wife is wearing a large pair of my gloves over her own, because it is very cold.

I will remember that one of these was lost on the way back and I had to retrace our footsteps to look for it.

That memory of cold and falling dark will hopefully associate with my secondary memory tag for today: accompanying a friend to the airport that night to collect his wife's aunt. His wife is pregnant and due to deliver this week. There were traffic warnings and I volunteered to go with him so his wife could stay in the warm and I could help if the road became impassable, as had happened the night before, when the snow fell. All went well and he dropped me at the end of my road at two o'clock in this morning.

The image of my wife in the gloves outside the museum will hopefully be enough to bring this all to mind in the years to come.

I was actually taking a photograph of her as she stood there.

One day I hope we will look at the photograph and I will say, "Do you remember this day? It was when...."

And we will laugh and smile together.

Where I lay down

Drifting off to sleep is a good time to review days lived. One theory of dreams is that our sleeping minds are reordering our memories and storing what is to be remembered.

The days stretch back through time. Since I began this process of remembering every day, they are a continuous chain of images on my mental calendar.

It is not only days that link the now to the past, but nights.

Sleep provides punctuation, but time flows without a break, washing over every bed where I have lain.

I have a curious sensation when I recollect my beds: I can remember the direction they pointed.

I think of lying in a bed and know whether it was in the same line, at 90 degrees, or whatever, to where I am now.

How accurate this is, I am not sure. If I try to place the bed on a mental map, it seems to be correct. Maybe I will investigate more rigorously one day. Possibly my subconscious has recorded the position of the rising sun. Maybe, like a pigeon, we can sense magnetic fields.

We spend a third of our lives in beds, often the same bed year after year.

I find them strong markers of a time and a place - and the direction in which I slept.

Connecting with bad days

We have moved back to the town where I lived before getting married. My wife and I have spent a period here before.

Cycling back from work on the dark cold evening of 1 February (part of my memory tag for that day), I remembered two of my wife's sisters staying at a guest house near my route many years before. In fact, close to eleven years, all but a week or two. They had come over for our pre-wedding party, shortly before we left the country to get married.

This was a memory tinged with shame, surely one of the most powerful emotions to make us want to forget.

It was not a major issue, but it has taught me a valuable lesson.

When we visited them the evening after they had settled in, I saw they had bought some food from the local shop I had shown them. But once home, my fiancé was upset as she said they were hungry because they didn't understand our food and had not eaten well all day.

I felt bad for not being aware, for thinking things were fine. My shame is I became angry at not being told when I could have done something about it. Which didn't help matters or ease my fiancé's concern for her sisters.

So that particular day, whatever date it was, does not have a particularly pleasant memory attached to it. The fact it comes to mind all this time later shows it has not really been forgotten. This is a trivial recollection of my human frailty. There are far worse days in my life, which I am not yet ready to share or delve into.

If I am to continue with this project of remembering every day of my life – and reclaiming as many past memories as I can from before I began this process – then knowing this will include bad days is not encouraging.

But then something else came back to me as I continued cycling home. At the earliest opportunity, the following morning, I took my wife's sisters shopping for snacks. From then on, whenever we ate out, I was mindful to take them through the menu carefully and patiently, explaining the different dishes, until they made a choice they were happy with.

That bad day connects to the lesson learned and the happy memories of meals enjoyed together.

Bad days – at least of a certain type – should not be an obstacle to remembering, if they are seen in a wider context, as part of a continuing story.

I hope, going forward, I can apply it further. Bad days can become bearable if there is some sort of resolution.

For those unresolved, perhaps there is something that can still be done to make them so.

The inviolable past

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
 Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (translation: Edward FitzGerald)

In remembering every day of my life, it is an advantage that past days are inviolable: nothing can be changed of a day lived.

It strikes me from time to time running back through the memory tags that now fill nearly a month and a half of my mental calendar that those tags will remain until the day I die. 

I can expand on the image to remember other things that happened that day. I can reinterprete the experiences. The past can guide my future actions. But the day is done and cannot be undone.

This makes the process of remembering easier, but is also a sobering reminder that the most animated of days is frozen forever as it becomes the past.

Genesis

My wife is religious and so we read a "daily bread" book most mornings, with a Bible passage and then some words of wisdom to explain and apply it.

I am no longer religious, but did read the Bible from cover to cover some years ago (how many is something to be remembered in due course). I went through a conversion experience and was later baptised. But the more I learned of the Church's teaching, the less I could accept it and eventually had to reinterprete my experiences.

Often it strikes me in the readings with my wife and listening to preachers, how the less obvious message is drawn from scripture to try and fit it to Church dogma.

So it was this morning with a reading on Genesis and the entry of sin into the Garden of Eden and the fall of mankind.

When I read this at a time of what I will call spiritual awakening, it seemed a very clear metaphor for the emergence of self awareness in the human species.

In the beginning we were unaware that we were naked and, like all other animals, not troubled by concepts of good and evil. Like the hunters and the hunted, we followed our instincts without wondering why.

At some point in the evolution of primates that led to homo sapiens, or perhaps as a result of cultural development, we became self aware. We gained knowledge that we are like others of our kind, and like those we saw die, would one day perish. Ever since, we have seeking a way to live with that knowledge and turn the curse into a blessing, by seeking after a higher purpose.

If we are inherently sinful, it is because it is the nature of life to preserve itself and that can conflict with what is good for other individuals or even wider groupings. But it does not require religion for people to do to others as they would be done by.

What is this to do with remembering? A great deal. On an individual level, my very world view has changed over time, and shaped my perceptions and actions accordingly. In my more distant past, there are not only events to recall, but a different way of thinking, of being.

More generally, how we, as people and societies, remember the past - and the stories we tell about it - influences the present and so the future.