Very often when we remark, “How did time fly by so quickly?” what’s actually meant is some version of “I don’t remember where the time went.”
—Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies
Time travel seems like the stuff of science fiction. Yet the human brain has a curious capacity for such voyages. Sit quietly and your consciousness travels somewhere, often somewhere in the past. Artifacts direct this travel in startling ways. I pull a book from the shelf and a receipt falls out. August 2002. I am suddenly back on the overnight train from Bangkok to a port on the coast of Thailand. I can feel the train rumbling beneath me as I walk through the sleeping compartments in the darkness.
This memory is incredibly vivid, yet the vividness is puzzling. I know I have not consciously thought of this scene in years. Where was this all stored, to be so easily pulled to the present?
“Memory is indeed mysterious,” says Liz Currin, a clinical psychologist who spends her working hours probing stories of her clients’ pasts. Most people have memories dating from around age three. Others have no memories until much later in life, which is often a side effect of childhood trauma. The wounded brain buries things deep to protect itself, building up layers until the soil appears smooth. But in all people, telling details eventually poke their way to the surface. As with my receipt, it doesn’t take much. “It could be a song, for instance,” says Currin. “The most powerful of our senses in terms of evoking a memory appears to be the olfactory one.” One whiff of honeysuckle and I remember a cheap perfume I happened upon as a teenager. It is a heady scent; it was a heady time.
For most of us, this mental travel is close to random. But Currin, knowing the power of memory, carefully evokes it to deepen her own sense of the past. She has two girls, Elyse and Sarah. They are now grown and off living their own lives. So “I frequently indulge myself in memories of them [as children] by imagining a treasure chest,” she says. “When I open it, it is overflowing with beautiful jewels and gems, all sorts of colors and shapes. I’ll reach into the chest and pick up one stone. I hold it in my hands, turn it over, relish the feeling and the beauty of it.”
One particular memory that she returns to often is of taking her very young daughters to the neighborhood pool. The day is warm and sunny. She recalls many details: getting them into their bathing suits, slathering them with sunscreen, packing up pool toys, and then loading the entire entourage into the car. She notes the humor at this point in the narrative: for such invasion-of-a-country level of preparation, the drive was all of a block and a half.
They swam; they came home. There was a fruit cup, putting things in the washing machine, a story, and a nap. It is “nothing remarkable,” she notes. Still, “it is one of my most treasured memories.” It has lingered in her mind as that summer turned to autumn, and then as more summers turned to autumns. Days go by. Years go by. Yet even if these splashing girls have drifted down the stream of time into the past, “I can return to the treasure chest any time I want,” Currin says. The frequent polishing of such memories “keeps me closely connected to my daughters in their earliest years.”
The treasure chest is a lovely image. It is one I like evoking as I think of what jewels exist from my own early days and the ones I am placing in the treasure chest of time now. My first memory is probably from around the age of three. I am a small child in this hazy recollection, and I am receiving a tea set. I must have been amazed by those tiny china cups if this image, of all possible images, is extant from that time. In another memory, I am singing a solo in a Christmas service at White Memorial Presbyterian Church. I was five years old. I wore a big red bow with my choir robe. I recall being in front of the church, looking out at the two sides of pews and the balcony, and singing the third verse of “Away in a Manger.”
The intensity of such things—joy, performance—adds weight to memory. It is probably not random that these images are anchored in my brain. Memories get shaped to form a story, and the stories become who we are.
But these stories are not just interesting for psychologists seeking clues to our current dilemmas. The existence of memories turns out to have profound implications for how we feel about time: whether it is scarce or abundant, whether it feels full or like it has slipped through our fingers. Often, we treat memory as more filing cabinet than treasure chest. We assume things are stored automatically, as they exist, even if we know the papers fade as time goes on.
Yet people who have a holistic perspective on these matters know that memory is more than that. What goes in as raw material can be polished with attention. Indeed, in one’s mind, the past is defined as much by how you interact with it now as it is by what happened. It is an entity you can create a relationship with. Much like a love affair, the richness of the relationship stems from the effort put into creating more raw material for the future—things that will someday fill the treasure chest—and then honoring the past, a truth many people resist with love and resist with time too. We are always tempted to overindulge the experiencing self—the present—at the expense of other versions of ourselves. But here, especially, time discipline leads to time freedom. We say that “we want more time,” said NYU psychology professor Lila Davachi in the talk she gave at the TEDWomen conference in 2016, but “what we really want is more memories.”
The creation of these memories is within our control when life is oriented toward adventure. It is easier not to choose adventures of both physical and emotional varieties. It is easier not to curate them afterward. It takes time to do more with memory than shoving old receipts into books or accidentally catching a whiff of honeysuckle, but doing so stretches time. This wooing of memory creates a deeper sense of self. The future is compelling. The past is rich. This mind-set is crucial to feeling like you have all the time in the world.
That more memories means more time may not seem immediately apparent. Understanding this connection requires knowing how the brain processes and archives what is going on around it. We have short-term, active engagement with the immediate world. We can repeat back a phone number and remember putting the coffee mug in the microwave (usually). But a lot of what passes through our existence is either archived deep in something akin to a reference library’s stacks or tossed in the trash entirely.
An example: Do you have any recollection of today’s date, two years ago? Maybe if you just started a new job you do, or if you had some noteworthy success or failure.
Most likely, though, there was nothing that made that day stand out from others. The routine was comfortable enough in the moment. On a day just like this, you got up, got yourself and possibly other people ready, commuted to work, answered emails, attended meetings, went home, made dinner, watched TV, and went to bed, but routines are comfortable for a reason. We don’t have to think about them. Thinking and cataloging consume energy. If there is nothing to think about, there is no reason to catalog any of it. This is the brain deciding, with reason, that life would be unlivable if we remembered all 15.5 to 17.5 waking hours of every day. Some aspects of life are utilitarian. Your brain does not need to remember getting dressed this morning. Wise people often structure their lives to limit the brain space devoted to utilitarian concerns. A curated wardrobe of eleven flattering work outfits preserves cognitive capacity for difficult decisions.
It makes sense, but when it comes to time and memory, here is how this plays out. The brain decides that if you drive the same one-hour route to work 235 mornings a year, and you do so for the roughly 4.25 years that compose the average job tenure, these one thousand trips can be telescoped in memory into one trip.
Just like that, one thousand hours becomes one hour. That two-hour Tuesday-morning status meeting that always has you watching the clock? Each one seems endless, but they are similarly endless, and so in hindsight shrink to nothing. The usual weeknight routine of scrolling through headlines before bed consumes hours, but they are forgettable hours.
When enough sameness like this stacks up, whole years disappear into memory sinkholes. At a rate of one thousand hours becoming one hour, an 800,000-hour life would become like eight hundred hours: the equivalent of less than five weeks. As philosopher and psychologist William James writes on time, “Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.” Time is measured only in the changing heights of children: “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown!” This is said in astonishment to a child you saw three years ago, which did not fill the cognitive space of 26,280 hours.
Some of this is inevitable, and yet, contrasted with adult routine, other parts of life seem more expansive. Ask around and you’ll find that almost everyone believes time moves faster now (when we are older) than in the past (when we were younger). Time itself plods along at the same pace, so the only way to explain this seeming acceleration is that our perception changes.
James touts this explanation: When we are young, life is the opposite of those thousand identical commutes. All is new. And not only are we seeing things for the first time, we’re figuring life out, and thus taking risks we might not take as an adult. This creates emotional intensity that likewise deepens time.
There is something to this. I see this in the different ways my children and I interact with time and the physical world. One snowy January day a few years ago, I followed Sam, then six, into the backyard to keep an eye on him. We trudged through untouched snow that came up to my knees and close to his waist. He followed behind me until we came to a small tree. Then he broke off to labor across the drifts, climbed the tree, and inched out along a limb that was perhaps six feet in the air. He talked to himself softly for a long time. I strained to listen. Eventually I realized he was working up the courage to leap off the branch and into the snow. In those moments there was fear, and daring, and finally exhilaration as he threw himself into the powdery white. Mix this intensity with the novel, nearly unrecognizable landscape, and his brain was laying tracks of the sort my boots were cutting through the snow. My brain—stuck on more pedestrian matters, such as whether my 12:30 P.M. phone call was happening despite schools and many offices being closed—was more of a well-shoveled, well-trod driveway. It would not have occurred to me to leap off a branch, even subtracting any grown-up fear of injury.
The memories that do stand out in adulthood tend to show this newness or intensity. There are the big ones. I can recall my first few dates—literally, the dates on the calendar—with my husband in extensive detail. I can remember the births of my children, particularly the fourth, whose swift arrival necessitated a frantic drive to the hospital. Pain slows the experience of time, and I remember every excruciating traffic light between the house and the hospital parking lot. Indeed, my mind drifts to that night every time I stop at those traffic lights now.
Such experiences are by their nature memorable. So are vacations with their novelty. As Davachi explained in her talk, if you think of each discrete event that happens to you as a memory unit, “in an environment with a lot of variety and change, you’re forming far more memory units than in an environment with very little change. It’s these units—the number of these units—that determine our estimates of time later on. More units, more to remember, and time expands.”
Going through normal life, you might only remember half a dozen interesting events over the past two weeks. Travel somewhere exotic, and you can have half a dozen new experiences before breakfast. Your brain has no idea what it will need in the future, so it is marking all of it. That can make a day feel like a fortnight. A similar phenomenon could happen on a day that featured half a dozen emotionally intense situations.
I know I have experienced this. The week I heard Lila Davachi speak about time and memory featured both novelty and intensity. So it is scored—by date—into my mind. I spent a long weekend before (October 21–24, 2016) at Disney World and Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. We stayed late at the parks, after the crowds had left, and rode Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey through the Dementors and past dragons. We sped along on Epcot’s Test Track through the Florida night. Amusement park rides are designed to be novel and intense. That is their whole purpose, and they did not disappoint.
Home on Monday the twenty-fourth, I flew on Tuesday the twenty-fifth to San Francisco, where I ran along the Embarcadero early that first morning of the twenty-sixth, taking in the gorgeous bay and the caws of the birds. I did a test run of my TED Talk, and met my fellow speakers. I practiced again and again in my hotel room. The next morning, Thursday the twenty-seventh, I did my hair and let the makeup artist press on my fake lashes. I remember standing behind the stage curtains and doing those power poses that Amy Cuddy recommended for confidence in her TED Talk. I took the TED stage. With the lights on me, I spoke for my twelve minutes. The audience laughed when they were supposed to laugh, and nodded when they needed to, and though those twelve minutes are the same length of time that it takes me to make my children chocolate-chip pancakes in the morning, I know that I am more likely to think of this experience when I remember 2016 than any given morning making breakfast.
I was fortunate enough to speak in the first session of the conference, so I could relax for the others. Even so, time didn’t speed up. I listened to dozens of other speakers create memorable experiences in their twelve to eighteen minutes. Many talks were intense, on topics from sexual assault to the murder of one speaker’s family. As I sat in the hotel bar that Friday afternoon, waiting to go to the airport for my red-eye home, I could not believe that I had arrived in Orlando a mere 168 hours before. I had just lived through one of the longest weeks of my life.
Not all weeks can be like that. I don’t want all weeks to be like that. I barely saw my youngest child (it was a big-kids-only trip to Orlando), and I did precious little writing. Leaving aside the practical matter of earning a living, I am genuinely happy puttering with my words, even if no given session of parking myself in my chair stands out from the rest.
There is nothing wrong with routines. People draw pleasure and comfort from routines, and good routines in the long run make success possible. It is partly the contrast between normal life and the heightened experience of travel that makes vacations memorable. In the absence of any normality, novelty itself would become tiring.
What I am arguing for is not the absence of routine, or that you need to figure out one thousand different ways to commute during those one thousand otherwise identical mornings. It is for a different balance between the normal and the novel than people might naturally create. I believe that even normal days can be made special—can be made memorable—with a mind-set toward adventure. I believe that consciously choosing to create such memories will stretch the experience of time.
In the Jewish tradition, before the Passover meal, the youngest person at the table asks, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” In the Passover context the answer is that the night celebrates a defining event in extended family history, but this is a wonderful question in a secular context too. One might inquire this of any twenty-four hours. Why is today different from all other days? Why should my brain bother holding on to the existence of this day as it curates the museum of my memories?
I would venture that for nine out of ten days, and maybe for a higher proportion, most of us have no answer. The day is forgettable. So it is forgotten. When the ratio of forgotten days climbs high enough, that is a shame. Not all days can be Passover (or any holiday you celebrate), but that doesn’t mean there can be nothing setting the day apart, or maybe just one day of every handful apart, hallowing it in the treasure chest.
Dorie Clark, a personal branding guru and author of Stand Out and Entrepreneurial You, has spent much of the past few years happily building her business, but when she came to the end of 2015, she “had this alarming realization,” she says. “People asked me the question ‘What do you like to do besides work?’ and I didn’t have any kind of answer for them. Work was all I did, and I realized that was upsetting.” It was upsetting philosophically—there is more to life—but it also felt financially foolish. “I live in New York City. If all I was doing was working, I could do that from anywhere. I could do that from a shack in the middle of the desert,” she says. “Why pay to live in one of the world’s most expensive cities if I wasn’t taking advantage of it?”
So in 2016 she came up with an idea of having at least one uniquely New York adventure each week. “That way, I would feel at the end of the year like I’d taken advantage of the place where I was living.”
She attacked her goal with gusto. “I get motivated by quantifying things, so I started writing everything down. Whenever I did something it went into my phone.” Soon, the list included a tour of Hasidic Brooklyn and a visit to the Armory. She checked out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Gansevoort Market. She took in an Upright Citizens Brigade comedy show, and saw a Samantha Bee taping. She even got to see Jerry Seinfeld perform when he stopped by a comedy club (unannounced!) where she’d gone for an evening’s entertainment. She went to Broadway shows and ate at Sardi’s. She biked the path along the West Side Highway. She hit the Russian Tea Room, the Rainbow Room, and the Tribeca Film Festival, and ate her way through a list of the city’s best pizzerias. She visited a shopping mall in Queens at the far end of the 7 line in Flushing, where the vast food court features more than thirty stalls selling authentic Asian cuisine. The project created its own momentum. By January 2017, she had documented far more than fifty-two only-in-New-York memories.
The goal encouraged several positive behaviors. First, she became more mindful of choosing how she would spend her free time. While New York adventures can just happen, her weekly target meant that she “was making an effort to seek them out.” She became a subscriber of Time Out New York because, she says, “I needed that information to inform my choices.” In the past, she used to read about things and “maybe save the article, and say this would be nice to do someday.” To a busy person, “someday” is a synonym for “never.” Thanks to her list, “someday” became a specific day on the calendar. The goal also helped her choose between activities such as a movie or a museum exhibit. Without the New York–specific criteria, “I might otherwise not have a good reason to decide between those things. But I could see a movie anywhere or anytime. I can’t go to this time-limited museum exhibit in New York [anywhere or anytime], so I should privilege that.”
Forcing herself to venture out of the apartment and into new neighborhoods means that “now New York itself is this rich landscape of memories and associations where it wasn’t necessarily before.” Even walking from the subway conjures up stories: I did this. Remember when we did that? A Saturday night when you see Jerry Seinfeld certainly answers the question of how today is different from all other days. In a city like New York, some of this is pricey, which I suppose is the usual reason for choosing Netflix over the Brooklyn Museum, but much is free. I well remember the early morning from my New York years when I traveled downtown to see the old Fulton Fish Market, with the mountains of ice, the fires where vendors burned their crates, the bloody mess of fish heads glistening and pungent in the dark under the highway.
Even daily life can answer the question of difference. In my time-perception survey, people who agreed that “Yesterday, I did something memorable or out of the ordinary with my time” were 14 percent more likely than average to agree that they generally had enough time for the things they wanted to do.
I analyzed the time logs from the thirty people with the highest time-perception scores, and found that their lives were shockingly interesting for a March Monday. One woman bought movie tickets online at 6:00 P.M. and by 7:00 P.M. was in the theater, viewing Beauty and the Beast with her family. One respondent picked up a friend and went to a community event for social entrepreneurs. Another fixed dinner for her ten-year-old at 7:00 P.M., and then hit a local spa for a massage at 8:00 P.M. I spotted a 9:00 P.M. salsa dancing session on one log. One Los Angeles respondent and her cousin entertained various children by having them try on an actor family member’s bird costume, resulting in much hilarity. One respondent ushered the babysitter in at 8:00 P.M. and promptly zipped off to a big-band concert. Remember, this was on a Monday night.
Even people without such obvious adventures were still likely to spend their evening hours doing something more interesting than watching TV: a family trip to the park, for instance, to take advantage of late March’s longer light, or a postprandial 8:00 P.M. stroll.
What is memorable? What creates emotional intensity? Bits of time can become bits of joy. For instance:
If you like to be a regular somewhere for lunch, and there is much pleasure in being one, maybe you go there two or three times per week and try somewhere else the other days.
Park in a different lot some ordinary Tuesday and take a morning walk through a new neighborhood. Then make an evening stop in a store that intrigued you when you passed it on the way into work.
Seek out a colleague you’ve previously only said hello to for a real conversation.
Speak up in a meeting you normally just observe.
Write a letter to the editor for the local paper some night when you would have watched TV, and enjoy your sense of pride and accomplishment when you see it printed three days later.
On a summer night, hit the neighborhood pool for an evening swim.
Put a picnic blanket in the backyard and eat breakfast outside.
Slip out of work early on a Wednesday and meet your spouse for a drink before taking your normal train home.
Invite friends to join you for a short hike in a nearby state park—you know, the one with the gorgeous pine trees, the one you’ve lived near for the past four years and have yet to visit.
It is simple enough to make a day different, and therefore memorable. This raises the question of why we don’t do it, or at least why fewer people bother than would enjoy the memories afterward. The answer is that the “self” is really multiple selves:
The anticipating self is wondering about, planning, and worrying about the future.
The experiencing self is in the here and now.
The remembering self thinks back to the past.
Creating more memories—and hence creating more time—requires privileging the anticipating and the remembering selves above the experiencing self in ways that require serious self-discipline.
One small concession in this difficult project is that when it comes to pleasurable adventures, the anticipating self and the remembering self are often aligned. Indeed, reports Davachi, “They involve the same brain systems.” To anticipate an event or to remember an event, your brain constructs a narrative out of familiar images for something that isn’t happening now. It doesn’t matter that the events actually happened in the past or are only in your mental picture of what might happen in the future. Notes Davachi: “The brain doesn’t respect time.”
The anticipating self is the planner who sets anchors in the future. As I picture this version of myself, I see her watching that documentary about the Galápagos Islands, and looking at her vacation schedule and figuring out when she might be able to go there. The anticipating self hears from a friend about the amazing exhibit at the local art museum and sees that Friday evening might be a great time to go. Once she sets her intentions, she mulls over these plans, thinking about what these future experiences will be like. When the anchors are strong enough, the anticipating self can pull the experiencing self into the future when she needs to. Many a dreary March commute has been warmed by the sun at the beach rental, booked for July. Indeed, anticipation may account for most of the happiness associated with events. Knowing you have a reservation for your favorite restaurant on Saturday night allows you to experience some of the pleasure you’d have in the moment of eating. Unlike the moment of eating, however, anticipated pleasure can extend for weeks.
The remembering self is anticipation’s sidekick. She (or he—depending on your gender) is the keeper of your identity. She smiles at the photo of her children, on the desk, from when they were small and the family spent that spring Saturday at the botanical gardens. All is color and happiness and the baby’s fat fingers clutching at that young mother’s neck. Memorialized like this, the day can hold its own in the wash of the past. It can be recalled and referred to, setting a marker in the current of time.
We can anticipate for years. We can remember for decades. The challenge is that the present—the moment occupied by the experiencing self—has a disproportionate effect on our actions, given its fleeting nature. The remembering self loves that photo of the children in the garden, but that’s easy for her to say. Bliss is possible in the past and in the future but seldom in the present. To get the children to the botanical gardens, the experiencing self had to deal with the four-year-old’s bitter complaints that he doesn’t want to go anywhere, the two-year-old’s diaper blowout on the way out the door, and the baby screaming and throwing her pacifier somewhere in the car. It is all such bother. The anticipating self thought it would be fun to go to the art museum on a Friday night—when admission is free and there’s a bar and music!—and the remembering self will fondly recall the masterpieces, and maybe even a new friend made in line for chardonnay, but the experiencing self is tired after work. The experiencing self is the one who will have to brave the cold and the rain and the Friday-night traffic.
The experiencing self resents this division of labor. So she throws a tantrum. She ignores the anticipating and remembering self and justifies her betrayal with statements that are certainly true: I’m tired. The museum will be there next Friday. So I’ll just watch TV. Immediate effortless pleasure wins out over the more effortful variety. Writes philosopher Robert Grudin in Time and the Art of Living, “We pamper the present like a spoiled child.” We indulge its whim to scroll through Facebook posts from people we never liked in high school anyway. Then this time is nothing. It disappears as if it doesn’t exist.
There is no easy answer for solving this past-present-future dilemma. People are horrible at considering their future selves. That’s one reason people underinvest for retirement. But I do think that knowing this aspect of human nature helps. When I catch myself listening too much to the experiencing self (You know, the kids are happy watching TV and if you get in the car for forty-five minutes after drinking coffee you’ll really need to find a bathroom at the end of the trip and . . .), I pause and try to remember that this is just one actor carrying on a monologue in what should be a three-actor play. Then I repeat a two-part mantra:
Plan it in.
Do it anyway.
If my anticipating self wanted to do something, my remembering self will be glad to have done it. Indeed, my experiencing self may even enjoy parts of it. I am tired now, but I will always be tired, and we draw energy from meaningful things.
I also remember this: all time passes. Whether I do anything today or not, eventually I will be on the other side of the next twenty-four hours. It can be filled with “nothing” (in this case, meaningless somethings), or it can be filled with something more intriguing. As for that intriguing something, even if my anticipating self is more timid, eventually I will be on the other side of this activity. If it doesn’t kill me—and most things won’t—I’ll be left with a good story. I can push.
And so I do. One December Saturday not long ago, I had hemmed and hawed about doing everything that might conceivably fit in the day. The forecast called for snow, and the day’s proposed itinerary involved breakfast with Santa at Longwood Gardens, and then a wrestling meet for Sam, and a train trip into NYC with him to meet the other kids and my husband—who wanted to go to the American Museum of Natural History—and a quick stop at a holiday party my husband wanted to attend. Then I would go downtown solo to take in a choir concert. I would take the train back to Trenton to get my car, and drive home after midnight.
It was a hard day. Leave aside the logistics of handing off children in Midtown Manhattan, or that my toddler began throwing food in my husband’s colleague’s apartment. The drive home was what had me completely stressed out, because fog had rolled in so thick that I could not see which entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike from U.S. 1 went east or west. Only my familiarity with the toll plaza steered me straight. Yet once I woke the next morning and had my coffee, what lingered of the day was mostly seeing my kids on Santa’s lap, the bloodred poinsettias in the snow-covered greenhouse, the moment the referee hoisted my little wrestler’s arm up in victory, and a gorgeous wash of voices singing of warmth, wonder, and birth.
Notes Dorie Clark: “We’re making choices regardless, by dint of how we spend our time. So do you want to make the choices consciously or unconsciously?”
Conscious fun takes effort. This seeming paradox—Why should fun be work?—stops us in our tracks. So we overindulge in effortless fun (scrolling through Instagram posts about dinner parties), and underindulge in effortful fun (throwing a dinner party ourselves). But “although minutes spent in boredom or anxiety pass slowly,” writes Grudin, “they nonetheless add up to years which are void of memory.”
It is the effortful fun that makes today different, and makes today land in memory. You don’t say “Where did the time go?” when you remember where the time went.
But planning in fun, and doing it regardless, is not the whole story for stretching time. Memory must be cultivated. Having a real relationship with memory requires treating it as a living thing. In a way, it is. Things do not just happen, the mind recording them exactly as they happened, with these memories accessible as one might look up a number in the phone book. The mind chooses to remember some things more vividly than others. It constructs stories from disparate events, or at least its impressions of disparate events—which may not be how others saw the same events—which then become the tighter truth to you the more you tell the story. Try asking spouses, separately, to describe their wedding. They were both there. It definitely happened, but both will remember different things. They will recount the day in different ways.
Some memories will score deep regardless of your desires. That’s why I remember the traffic lights en route to the hospital. In most cases, though, you can help the process along. You can actively choose to document your adventures in ways that will help you pull them out.
Modern sorts need no encouragement to take photos. What we do need encouragement for is their active curation: choosing the best to make photo books that we will pause from our days to ponder rather than just having a big file on the iPhone that will be lost when the iPhone gets forgotten on the bus. There are many reasons to keep a journal; nudging the day’s events into active memory is one. My time logs document in detail how I spent past days. Scrapbooks elevate the fine art of memory keeping.
Cementing memories can be a social thing too. At the dinner table, ask people to tell stories of their days. Consciously set memories into your senses; even a bar of hotel soap can become associated with a trip if you make a point of sniffing it daily during your vacation.
That helps in the future. The trouble is that we haven’t necessarily done this with previous experiences. But as Grudin writes, “Experience merely forgotten is seldom beyond recall, if we try hard and patiently to bring it back. It is only when we forget having forgotten that a door closes between us and the past.”
Research supports this poetic notion that memories can become sharper after the fact, even if the research is generally in the context of negative memories.
Davachi reports that she and her colleagues conducted a study on this aspect of memory, with two phases. In phase one, people were shown neutral images (animals, tools). In the second phase, they were shown similar images (animals, tools) and given a light shock on the wrist when one of the kinds of images (only animals or only tools) appeared. Not surprisingly, subjects developed sharper memories of whatever kind of image came with a shock in phase two. People shocked when they saw tools remembered the tools better than they remembered the animals. Curiously enough, though, they also eventually had better recall of these kinds of images from phase one—before they were shocked. The shocks taught their brains that one particular category of images was important, and so their brains searched back through the past for examples, and gave these examples new places of prominence.
Most of us don’t want to shock ourselves to sharpen memories, but this research does suggest that we can do things in the present to deepen our experience of the past. I like the image of wooing memory. Perhaps it’s exposing ourselves to certain songs, sights, or smells. Proust’s fragrant madeleine conjured up more than seems proper for a mere cookie. “Similarly, when we strive to reconstruct some period deep in our past,” writes Grudin, “it is helpful to search for some physical detail which is remembered almost viscerally and which, when felt again, may bring with it the whole emotional context of earlier time.”
I recommend carving out time for “dwelling in the past,” a phrase that has a more negative connotation than it deserves. On a long car trip, play those albums from a time you wish to remember. Songs can resurrect teenage elation and longing. You are suddenly seventeen, and in your car, and turning to that equally wide-eyed person next to you. You are pulling close for a kiss you can still remember twenty-five years later.
These days, I unearth memories like an archaeologist. How many more travel receipts, and the equivalent, are hidden around the house? I pause to look at a white coat in my closet. It is dingy now, but I cannot bring myself to dump it, because I touch its fuzzy sleeves and for a moment I am twenty-four, and wearing it on a weekend trip to London with the man who was four months away from asking me to marry him. I was in love, and dazzled that someone might whisk me to London for the weekend, and I was in that coat, and in the first pass of memory all is bliss, though I have no doubt I got off that plane as jet-lagged as I have ever been after a flight to Europe. That was the experiencing self, and as I think about it more, I remember other trials the experiencing self endured. The Heathrow Express was broken, so we took a cab (in traffic) downtown. The hotel magnanimously let us check in early, for what we later learned was the price of an extra night. My older and more well-traveled beau noted that in the developing world, cabdrivers would cheat you out of two dollars. It takes a fancy London hotel to stick you with a bill for an extra two hundred pounds. Yet in memory the white coat conjures up walking through an autumnal Hyde Park, and staring into each other’s eyes over pints in a pub.
Cleaning out a desk or cleaning out a closet can unearth relics. Or sometimes, we can do bigger things to revisit certain times of our lives.
In May 2017, I celebrated my twentieth anniversary of graduating from the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, a public residential high school for juniors and seniors, by returning to give the commencement address. The weight of years felt heavy; I knew that the seniors in the audience had not been born yet when I got my diploma. But despite my rational knowledge of this space, when I flew to Indianapolis that Friday, drove on I-69 through the cornfields to Muncie, Indiana, parked on those familiar streets and opened the car door, it was as if I had never left.
I breathed in the familiar smell: the trees, the White River. I remembered showing up there as a sixteen-year-old in 1995. I was eager to be out on my own. I wanted to learn everything I could. I sensed, then, that if I could do well on that stage I might be given more opportunities, ones that would take me out of those cornfields I was now flying back to in 2017.
The landscape of Ball State University, and the “Village” of stores nearby, quickly unlocked the map that still existed somewhere in my mental archives. Each building unearthed another memory. The old coffee shop was still there. It was under new management and sporting a different name, but looking much as it did. The White Rabbit used-book store was still in business. The familiar-looking proprietor was still not wearing shoes, even if twenty years later I looked trustworthy enough that he let me keep my bag as I perused the stacks. I am quite sure that much of the inventory had been on those shelves the last time I was there. I walked behind my old dorm and found the window from my junior-year bedroom. I remembered staring out that window every morning at the dining hall, the classrooms, the parking lot, the Dumpster.
I tried to remember what it was like to be that sixteen-year-old girl. I tried to remember what she thought, what she wondered about the future. Would she be happy with my life now? I would like to imagine so, though I suspect she harbored ambitions for her pulpy novels to be as ubiquitous as Nicholas Sparks in the White Rabbit. In any case, in the heat of that late May day I let myself dwell on a few memories that made me smile. Then I felt the tug of some harder moments too. It was never an easy place. The Greek roots of “nostalgia” combine the words for homecoming and ache. Such sweet pain is a complex emotion, but a beguiling one. It is why we turn the radio up for songs that can conjure such wistful intensity.
As I walked around the campus, I mulled this thought: dwelling in the past requires a forgiving mind-set. The emotional dramas that are long water under the bridge mattered to me once as I hunted through the stacks in the White Rabbit, as I gazed at that eternal Dumpster. They consumed my time once. I should understand the person who cared so deeply. She is part of me. Whoever I am is because of what she learned. As I get to know her, the lived hours of my life become larger, no longer telescoped into little moments as I acknowledge them.
Onstage that Saturday, I stood in my 1997 cap and gown in front of the shiny faces. They were who I once was. At that moment, they had more time than memories. Soon I will have more memories than time—maybe I already do. I told them to make life memorable. Do something memorable daily, because that is the only way to keep time from slipping through our fingers. We fully live our hours; we know how we spent those hours. Then, looking back, as we honor their memory, we can know who we truly are.