Remembering

Today, I remembered about this blog, so I logged in and had a look around. It felt rather like coming back to an old house or school or park, with its accompanying unpleasantness - for me, nostalgia is marked most consistently by a feeling of gawkish discomfort. While I was looking around, I thought about the idea of remembering and I made a connection with some of the most important events of my life so far, which have been characterised by a desire to retain an important memory of some kind.

I'm thinking in particular about times when I try to convince myself about the importance of my feelings on a particular subject that is often laid waste by subjective opinion. I often find it hard to maintain a strong opinion on things, and one of the ways in which I do so is by remembering times in my life when I have (transiently) had strong opinions that gripped me of their own accord.

When, for example, I find it difficult to explain to my friends and family why I believe in God, it's useful to bring my mind back to a time when I wasn't so dispassionate, when I was sitting on a hard pew at the back of a church or standing in a field looking at mud tracks and the night sky, and when I really believed in God and (because I know myself well enough) begged my future self to remember how I felt at that moment. There are a few analogous situations about issues on which I feel strongly, such as the idea that people should care for their elderly patients, or the opinion that human beings should never dispense justice.

It's strange, but I guess I do conclude that memory keeps me sane in that respect. Such impassioned pleas from my former self have rarely been retained (they've rarely been made, I think!) and so they're one of the few things that pull me into having consistent world views on the things most important to me. Even if I don't behave consistently with those views, being able to say what I believe in is life-giving to me for some reason.