Scratching for past memories

Most days I usually run back through the same day of the month for as far back as I have memory tags.

Now I am trying to go back further than 17 December 2011, the date I began this process of trying to remember every day that passes. 

To make it easy on myself I'm not trying to find image tags for the exact day, but coming up with something for each month.

So November 2011 is when we returned to my country from my wife's. I know the actual date we arrived was 20 November 2011, so the image is anchored there.

In October 2011, we went to a conference, staying with my sister-in-law. I don't have any specific memories or dates. Just the image of the conference.

In September 2011, I bought my father an e-book reader for his birthday while in our flat.

In August 2011,  we returned to our flat - need something more specific for this month.

In July 2011, my sister-in-law and family came to my mother-in-law's with a cake for my wife on her birthday. She always says a birthday is not a birthday without cake, and I had done my best and made some scones.

In June 2011, not too sure.

In May 2011, I had not yet left my country to join my wife, but left this month.

In April 2011, my wife and I rented a cottage and had friends and family stay to spend some time before we left my country.

And that's about as far as I have got so far. It is shockingly spartan, as well as difficult to find and place memories, even for a time as long as a month. What a contrast to 2012!

At some point I may well read my diaries, that will cover some of this period though with big gaps.

Until then, I will take it easy and see where it goes, just trying to get the months of 2011 straight before going any further back and not worrying if a month has something vague pinned to it, or even nothing.

After all, I do still have to add memory tags for each day as it passes.

Digging up the past

Can I reclaim the days that came before I began this process of remembering every day that passes?

Sometimes it strikes me as odd that I remember every day of the past 13 months, but the 46 years before that are pretty much a blur. Some of that blur was more significant to me than the last year.

Memories do come to me unbidden and from time to time I will reflect on particular events, but they are snapshots where one recollection might serve to represent a whole phase of my life.

For example, I learned to fly a plane when I worked in Africa in the mid 1990s. I can remember some moments of this experience in great detail, but not every flight and certainly not the dates.

When a friend at the reunion we had on 15 September 2012 told my wife a story of joining me on one of my flying lessons, which she thought we show her the sights, only to end up feeling ill as I practised landing after landing (getting none of the perfect), it draw a virtual blank for me. It was more a case of imagining it happening than remembering it happening.

I have a set of diaries that cover that time and stretch pretty much from when I was at college to the present day. I kept it going by not making it a duty to write. Sometimes I will let it go for months. Other times, I'd write regularly. Since I began this process I made a point of not writing things down (there is a blog posting here explaining why), but a few months ago I did pick it up to try to catch up, filling in far more than I have pinned to my internal calendar.

I have wondered if at some point I could use the diaries - which I very rarely read - to reconstruct the time before I began this process, if not in the same detail, at least with some images pinned to specific dates.

Whether this is realistic - or worth the effort and naval gazing - is not something I've resolved as yet.

But I have started exploring the possibility in an organic way. More about that next time.

I think I can do this

With my new speedy method for reviewing the images pinned to my internal calendar as prompts to remember the day, this process of remembering every day that passes has become easier.

I am almost nervous that it is too easy, because I fear becoming complacent and finding blanks start to appear.

But perhaps I have reached a new phase.

In the lightning runs through the past 13 months since I began this process every morning the point is now less to ensure the images are entrenched and more just to reflect.

Bubble meditation

I am now trying to synchronise recalling the images pinned to my internal calendar to my breathing.

Remember one day on breathing in, the next on breathing out, then move forward a week for the next two-day window. I switch to a three-day window on reaching three months ago and review every day of the last month, dispensing with the breathing link if it takes a little more thought to remember the image I have chosen.

During the breathing review yesterday, I was reminded of a meditation technique I practised for a while a long time ago. Actually, I may as well be more precise and say it was in 1986 when I was at college. I am now making a point of remembering so might as well be accurate when I can.

The instruction in the book where I took this from was to imagine being at the bottom of a swimming pool or lake - the lake I used is a real one I have visited. Allow a thought to rise like a bubble rising through the water towards the surface and the sunlight. When it reaches the surface, let it go. Then wait for the next thought. The idea was not to dwell on a particular thought, but to experience each for a short moment and let any lessons be subliminal.

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.