Share

Wednesday 15 January 2020

Forgetting remembering

I'm approaching the 3000 day milestone in this process of remembering every day that passes.

It continues, but has changed significantly from the early months and years, when I could review the images pinned to my mental calendar in a short period of time. My early techniques of a moving windows, pulling up a few days from past weeks or months to refresh them have long gone.

Now I generally work my way through a whole year at a time, but it takes longer and longer to do so.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I am recalling periods that took place up to 8 years ago now, running through them day by day. To be honest, I've moved on from a lot of these times. There is no longer the same attraction of delving into those memories. Revisiting places I once lived and activities of previous employment does not interest me to the same extent.

So, I'm less motivated to review these times. All the same they throw up surprises and insights and I would like the option of being able to remember these days when I choose.

But it is also getting harder. The time between reviewing the same images is now over a month. It might take me a couple of weeks to run through a year of images, several months to cover the 8 years. Some days, I might not give any time to the process of the more distant review. The recent past is of more interest and I continue to use my refresh techniques for recent weeks and months. That may take all the time I have free for reviews in a given day.

Now I find I no longer remember the last time I recalled the images. When reviews were less than a month apart I could remember remembering. There was a familiarity to the sequence of images or their places on my mental calendar. Now I'm forgetting remembering. If I come across blanks, it is harder to recover them.

All the same, there are long periods where I whizz through the images rapidly, covering a week in a matter of seconds. After struggling with 2018 and thinking this process may be reaching its natural end, I've found I've rattled through 2017.

I'm trying to cultivate the feeling of relaxing into the reviews again. They have started to become frustrating when I've hit blanks and the images have eluded me, which has put me off the whole review process. Accepting an image and expanding my memory of what happened on that particular day helps fill the other days, even some separated my months or years.

So I'm not done yet.

No comments:

Post a Comment