Seen Everything?

Once there was a single person who told the world he had seen all. “All” is an awful lot. In fact, all is more than I have seen in my life. Why do I bring this up, other than to fill white space? I bring this up because I spend some of my time looking back now. I know that I am not alone in this but I do recall older adults, when I was an adolescent, telling me I had to grow up before I would know what they knew. As always, I pondered that statement for years, off and on and when ever I heard another person, usually someone in their twenties, make the same or similar statement I just smiled.

I thought I had seen a lot during two combat tours. Indeed, I had seen more than I wanted to but all of those memories are distant now. Remembrance only lasts so long and this has nothing to do with my age. It has to do with our brains and what protective measures our brains have learned over a lifetime. Folks such as myself have brains that fuzz over the worst and make a person have to try hard to remember the worst aspects of, hell, any life. Of course, trying to recall past experiences is a double edged sword. If it flashes into your consciousness in technicolor you might be sorry you tried to bring it up again. Memories are, for the most part, best left to lie in the recesses of our brains. Dredging up the past can ruin your day at times.

In a world such as this, and I know no other world, the grief that is available to those who seek it is infinite. The fun times are few and far between but the mundane is the asphault of our life’s road. By fun times, I mean the titillating events that usurp the mundane and stand out like a bright light in a dark desert. I remember few of these but one was this nine year old kid who got taken to Disneyland in the mid-fifties, last century. The park was much smaller then and brand new but it was a thing such as nobody had ever seen as it was a first. Perhaps, depending on what your life dishes up for you, those childhood memories are all that keep an adult sane. I go back there now and then to balance “stuff” that comes up now and then. A brief excursion to “Adventure Land” can often alter the present perspective that some incident or other brings to the fore. Memories are of great value or we wouldn’t have them.

What if we had no memory? Think about that next time you are angry.

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