Daily Dose by Bikram Vohra
Isn’t it sad that we live most of our lives without any recall of what happened over the years. Like I am 65 and if I bundled all my memories together it would come to about two or three years max. The rest is all a blur, just white noise on the screen.
I don’t remember most of my schoolmates, hardly any of the teachers, neighbours, friends, the details of the routine of the daily grind. All I can grasp are milestones in events, good, bad, ugly, the wins and loses, about five epic squash matches out of 10,000 games, a few incidents, even there not all with any great merit because trivia smuggles itself even into these. And if you really sat down and tried to remember all your 30 or 40 or 60 years you’d come up with a C-minus in time terms. In between the milestones are wide gaps and even then they are not necessarily in the right order.
Time even blurs the major stops in your life. You have a rough idea but it kind of telescopes into a vague reality without all the details. Like you have spent forty new year eves… how many do you recall except maybe three or four. What happened to all the others, just as an example.
In a way it probably makes sense that we are not overloading our senses and can sift the grain from the gross. But that’s the ironic part. Much of the memories we retain with comparable clarity are pure dross. Some silly fight. A slight. Our enemies, those who hurt us or dumped us or sacked us. A slur we won’t let go even though it is passé. The negatives seem to have more power to fill in the ‘memory’ spaces than the positives.
Into this mélange we filter in our imagination which then re-moulds our memories to be what the way we wished they had happened rather than how they did happen. Finally, the imagined becomes the truth.
Which is why you can wonder if history is just an interpretation of events, changed through the prisms of many minds just as it is with you and I. What’s sauce for the individual is sauce for the world.
In a week I won’t even recall writing this.
Odd isn’t it, seeing as how we keep talking about leading full lives.