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.