Real and Raw over Past and Perfect

I'm what you might call a memory hoarder. I've got more souvenirs than I know what to do with scattered throughout my room, and I'm so unnecessarily fond of taking an excessive amount of pictures during road trips. I love memories. They remind you of good times you had in the past and keep you somehow connected to the feelings they brought even years later.

But I'll tell you a secret about memories. While they're wonderful and should be cherished above a lot of material possessions, they're not always 100% reliable. Time has a funny way of distorting things, since after all we are human and can't perfectly remember every detail. Add nostalgia to that, and you've got the perfect recipe for coloring things lovelier and happier than they actually were.

And yet we love to look back at the past to recall "better" times, don't we? The internet is abounding with nostalgic posts, lists of things we enjoyed in our childhood that aren't around anymore. Sometimes even old tv shows or movies seem so much more appealing than what's out now because they call us back to who we were and how seemingly simpler life was when they first came out. Of course, that can be a lovely thing. Nostalgia is a nice emotion to sink into every now and then. But it becomes a problem when past days and moments end up always looking better than the present ones we're living now.

The reality is that we catch only small glimpses of our days when we look at our lives in retrospect. One nice photo might lead us to believe a certain day was amazing- but we've forgotten about the anxiety of that morning, or that we cried ourselves to sleep that night. On the other hand, there might be days that seem so bad because of one thing that happened, that we forget how hard we laughed before it, or the good lesson we got out of it later on.

What I mean to say is this: it's okay to look back at past moments and remember them for what it seems now that they were. But it's really only the present moment that has any relevance. That's the only one we have the power to change, and the only one that we can fully experience for its reality- lovely and raw and flawed as it is.

I don't ever want to love memories more than I love real moments, no matter how imperfect they are. At the end of the day, I'd much rather really live in the imperfect present than waste my life longing for a "perfect past."

#christian #2015