The Gift of Memories

I count myself among the very lucky when I say that in my childhood, I had no experience of the loss of a loved one. My sweet grandmother died when I was eleven years old, and later other grandparents, but all in all I was most fortunate.

Having lived a continent apart from one set of grandparents, I am not blessed to have many memories of them, but until recently I never realized how much that means I missed. The threat of loss has revived whole banks of memories that I am enjoying and which have brought with them a happiness and appreciation for all of the wonderful times that we have shared in our lives, the people we have loved, the things that we learned and taught each other, and the warmth and love that we have possessed and nurtured over the course of a lifetime.

Being an advocate of Appreciative Living has been a challenge over the last few weeks.  I mentioned in an earlier blog that it is easy to feel appreciation on a good day, in the sunshine and warmth of figurative if not literal summertime, and harder to feel appreciation on a rainy, foggy, or gloomy day. But today, gloomy rainy weather notwithstanding, I am grateful for my memories. I am pulling the curtain back on the positive side of my screen, to expose more of the bright side.  It would be easy to let sadness, if not despair, take over. But I am making the effort to make conscious choices, not to put on a brave face, but to actually fully enjoy those memories that I own, to review and revel in them, to feel the warmth of our shared pasts, and to appreciate how much of who and what I am and will be, is the result of those happy experiences that I am lucky enough to remember and to be able to conjure up and relive.

None of us is so lucky that we come through life unscathed by loss or grief. Even our daily newspaper reminds us of war, hunger, loss, and hatred. But if you are lucky enough to have happy memories, turn up the volume on them, fill up the whole screen of your inner eye with them. Take a moment to actually feel how you felt on that happy day, savor the taste of what it felt like to be a loved child in your parents’ arms, or a youngster who has made her teacher proud, or a winner of a prize for excellence, or a volunteer helping someone who needed your help, or the performer of a simple act of kindness.

To those of us who keep a gratitude journal, we sometimes are too automatic in looking outside ourselves for that for which we are grateful. Perhaps it is good to remind ourselves how much of the good in our lives comes from within, and that we have much stored in our memories that can raise our happiness quotient just by using all our senses to see and hear and touch them again.

Renewal

I had the opportunity yesterday to learn a very valuable lesson: that sometimes (perhaps often) when we ascribe reasons for someone else’s behavior, we are very much mistaken, and if we are very lucky, like I was yesterday, to see the error of our thoughts, we have a chance at renewal.

Under difficult circumstances, I anticipated seeing someone I had not seen for many years. I was uncertain how we would feel when seeing each other, but luck and love were on our side and our first glance at each other brought back all the shared experiences, the shared memories, and the fondness of a lifetime. As a practicing adult (for many years), I am embarrassed to say that I was surprised—surprised that I had attached a far different meaning to our lack of communications than actually existed. I found her as endearing and bright and funny as she had always been, and I felt a sense of loss, for all the years that had passed without seeing each other, sharing our lives, loves, and losses.

Renewal is a gift at any point in life, the opportunity to recover emotions and memories that we had as kids and young adults, and bring a new spin to them as older adults. Last night, I felt younger for awhile, and then I felt so deeply the attachments of a lifetime, the bonds of love and family and what they really mean, that I felt that I had been touched by all the generations that came before, I felt my mother whispering to me that there is nothing like family, and I know that no matter what life serves up to us, it is the relationships that we choose to cherish, that make life worth living, and each day a delight. 

The gift of Renewal can be ours any and every day, if we choose to put aside our assumptions, open our hearts to new messages, forgive ourselves for being human and frail, and let the delight of every day in.

Gratefulness journal

I have been writing about Appreciating What Is for a while, and when I first began the study of Appreciative Living, the first assignment was a gratefulness journal. In it one is supposed to record three things each day that one is grateful for.  At first it seemed like a rote assignment—so OK, I appreciate my dog Lucy and the love she gives me, and I appreciate that we have had some rain, and I appreciate that I am feeling pretty good. And for a while that was that.  It was getting boring. Then I re-read the instructions, and saw what I had passed over at first: to take the next 30 seconds after you write down each entry to close your eyes and feel the appreciation. Can you imagine what happened? At first there is the resistance to take the time. But altogether one and a half minutes? Being stingy about a minute and a half is just silly.  You waste that amount of time waiting for your coffee to re-warm in the microwave, or sitting at a red light. I have discovered that using that 30 seconds for each of the things you list in your journal pays dividends all day. 

When I write that I appreciate my dog, and close my eyes to really feel it, I get a kind of mental slide show of all the best moments of our time together and when I look at her, what I see is all the love and  loyalty that have been mine for ten years. It is not that anything has changed, it is me that has changed.  It is that I am able to see with a fresh “eye” what has been there in front of me all the time. And by taking that 30 seconds to really feel how I feel, a little bit of it comes with me so that when Lucy strikes a puppy-like pose, even in her old age, I can see the puppy in her.

Today, the rain has ceased, and living here in California, we look at rain differently, not as something that happens all the time, but as an interruption of our eternal sunshine. However, now that the rain has stopped, all the hills around my house are green rather than brown, and because I have taken the time to actually feel something about that, when I look out the window, the green stands out, and I can feel the freshness and the renewal of the earth. As I drive around, I notice that the rain has washed the streets clean, and even buildings look cleaner and fresher.

And I am feeling pretty good.  I am grateful for that. I close my eyes and know that not everyone I love has that reassurance today. Some are in pain, some have the flu, some are worried about ongoing conditions, but I can say that I am warm and comfortable.  I do not dread that I have to go out shopping, or that I have chores to accomplish.  I appreciate that I can put myself aside for long enough to learn from my coach what he has to teach me today. I can notice the twinge here and there, but not take for granted my abilities and being able to do what I want to do, whether it is to take a walk, or sew on a button, or read a good book.

All in all, my gratefulness journal serves as a reminder of how lucky I am.  I think that in some ways it gives me the space to let others be who they are, whether I happen to agree with their ways of doing things or not. So take a few minutes at the end of your day, or perhaps just after dinner to gather up your thoughts and be grateful, and then to really feel what you are grateful for, and to smile.  Studies have shown that when you smile, you begin to feel happier, and that right there is something to be grateful for.