Breathing in and breathing out

A few days ago I change the method I used for reviewing the images pinned to my mental calendar as tags for remembering each day that passes.

I now use a two-day window for the most distant months. So today being Monday, I recall every Sunday and Monday since I began this process back in December 2011. This is a reduction from the three-day window I was previously using, though I am switching back to that when I reach about three months ago. For the last month I review the images for every day.

I am trying to become more relaxed with the images that are well entrenched, to the extent of recalling each image as I breath, the first day breathing in, the second day breathing out. I say the actual date in my mind as I do so. It is easy to jump to the dates for the following week.

Sometimes I take a little longer and may have to look back a few days earlier to orientate myself. Some days have more than one image or more detail I want to recall that takes longer.

But I think I will make this my goal for the entrenched time, to make the reviews as easy as breathing in and breathing out.

Paring down

As I enter my second year of remembering every day that passes, a new method for reviewing the images pinned to my mental calendar is emerging.

Each image - sometimes several images - pinned to a date allows me to recall what I chose to remember as a tag for that day and from that I can recall other aspects. I have been reviewing these images regularly and they now seem to be entrenched, but I remain fearful of stopping this process in case blanks begin to appear when I do look back.

I have been using a three-day window in my reviews, so on Sunday I recall the images for each Friday, Saturday and Sunday since I began this process. For the most recent month, I review all images. This has been working fine.

A couple of days ago, I thought I'd switch to a two-day window. I did consider just recalling the same day of the week going back to December 2011, but two consecutive days suits me better as the memories are often linked in some way and the moving window means the days daisy chain off each other each time I do the review.

Moving to a two-day window has cut the number of days in the review by almost a third, though not exactly a third as I still review the images for the full last month.

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.

That was the year that was

On the last day of 2012 newspapers, television and we ourselves look back over the past 12 months.

Thanks to following this process, I can remember every day of the year - at least the things I have chosen to remember as memory tags pinned to my mental calendar and the associated memories they enable me to access.

There are moments of change. The diagnosis that my too young niece has cancer. The results of an application. The slower transition of an overnight flight from one country to another. The milestone of moving into a new flat - and then moving out again.

But much of the time the change is as gradual as the seasons that provide the scenery through which I move. On many days my work routine is broken only by the ebb and flow of my relationship with my wife and my gradually improving running times and decreasing weight. Inexorably my hair grows - I have made a point of remembering my haircuts and have thereby cured myself of waiting two weeks too long between them.

For the year I have 366 images pinned to my mental calendar, which I can run through in my mind's eye in say an hour. If I remembered every second, it would take me a year, of course. These are my chosen selection of events and my view of these days is biased - and enriched - in ways I have been exploring on this blog.

If I had begun this process at the age of four, like the Brad Williams with hyperthymesia whose experience started me on this pathway, then I would have 43 sets of images to take me back to my childhood, past all the different people I have been as I have grown older and more experienced, and perhaps a little wiser. Waking each morning a little bit different, with new things to face as my world and the world around me changed.

In the retrospectives we will remember the people who are no longer with us. In some cases it will be a surprise that it was so long ago they passed away - I recall watching Whitney Houston's funeral service on the internet on 18 February 2012, it is my memory tag for that day.

Acknowledging every day that passes as I am doing makes me appreciate my days are numbered. As Thomas Hardy observed in one of his novels, which I devoured when at college, unbeknown to us every year we pass a date whose significance we do not know, the pre-anniversary of our coming death.

Holding the whole year of 2012 in my mind brings home how few days make up a life - and I have already lived longer than the life expectation of the not-so-distant past.

What I had for Christmas

Happy Christmas! I hope you received the presents you wanted - and some that you didn't, which are often more special.

I remember last Christmas well, but I did not make a point of remembering what I received from whom, or what I gave. This year I have decided to use the presents as a way of remembering the detail of the day.

This is an extension of a technique I have been developing. It involves remembering more than just an image to capture a day, extending into remembering key facts.

So when I attended the 20th reunion of a group I worked with in Africa, on 15 September 2012, I decided to remember everybody who made it to the event. When that date comes up in my reviews, I run through the 15 names.

I am using a freer version of this for my niece's wedding on 1 November 2012. Whenever I review the date, I try to think of a different aspect of the wedding, and if I have time, to relive several special moments.

Similarly for the work trip I made recently to India. I have a key image for each of the days spent there, but try to recall something extra each time, such as someone I met or something we discussed or did.

This year our Christmas gathering was on 24 December, eating late and staying up to open presents, as is the tradition in my wife's family.

I will try to remember a specific exchange of presents in each review. In this way I will carry the special moment of closeness with each relative who was there and retain a little of the spirit of Christmas for as long as I can remember.

Overlap

Now I am into the second year of remembering every day that passes.

I am not consciously changing the techniques I have developed to retain the memories, but something has changed organically.

I start my reviews from when I began this process on 17 December 2011, or the closest date after it, two days before the current day of the week. Today is Wednesday, so I run through the images pinned to my internal calendar for Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Automatically the layout of the calendar in my mind has changed. Until this week, those first dates lay at the start of the sequence of weeks. Now thinking back, December 2011 is separated as it would be in a real calendar. The January dates are at the start of the sequence, December requires a turn of the page.

In this way my mind is adjusting to the overlap of dates.

It seems it is the days of the week that align. 

Today, Wednesday 19 December 2012, lies over Wednesday 21 December 2011 - the day we arrived at my parents' house and went for lunch in town.

Of course, I know where I was on this date a year ago - and that because of the leap year it is two days earlier, not one.

The clarity remembering gives me makes the effort, such as it is, worthwhile.

Visiting my parents this year, they asked whether we had been together last year and when other members of the family had arrived. I know the answers. Though for the years before, it is a struggle for me to remember too.

One year on

And so a year ago today I began this process of remembering every day that passes.

I have images pinned to 366 days of my mental calendar, enabling me to recall key events as triggers for calling up each day.

From now on, I will know where I was and what I was doing a year ago.

There will be new challenges to retain and review this information, to avoid confusion between one year and another.

There will be new insights into how this perspective affects my life.

One thing: as Christmas approaches once more, I do not feel it has rushed around again.

So much has happened in the continuous sequence of days.