Old Age Day by Day January 29, 2012

I enjoyed a lovely day yesterday.  I took a long walk, was out with friends, meditated and heard a great dharma talk, and generally basked in the sunshine.  Today I'm headed up with my younger daughter to see my daughter-in-law and have brunch and shop.  It's gorgeous out. 

One of the subjects Adyashanti discussed was memory, and how it is not who we are.  I've been contemplating this idea a lot.  Our memories are often not true memories, because they are moments told to us over and over by others.  Also, the brain hides and reveals different angles on the same events over time.  And we change the story of the memory every time we speak of it, so it's relationship to the truth of what happened becomes more and more distant.  Memories create a veil over who and what we have experienced, and then pop up and surprise us.  It might be that they no  more define us than our dreams.  They are thoughts sweeping over us, but do we own them?  I now see some of my early memories as stories my parents and others told about me, but they reveal nothing about the complex little being I was.  They were portable and succinct, but were they real?  I trust only two memories from before I was five, and those I trust because no one else would ever bother to tell them, or know what I felt.  The first was standing in front of a mirror in our house and feeling angry because my mother had given me a haircut and I hated it, and her, because she was responsible for it.  She would never tell that story, and I wouldn't either.  It's not pretty.  The second is standing by our car on an overpass in Kansas City and looking all around the train yards and seeing nothing but water.  There had been a huge flood.  It felt bizarre and and unreal to see it, but it was real.

But stuff about me and my brother, about him peeing on me when they brought him home from the hospital - it could be true, it makes a great story, but do I really remember it?  No.  I remember seeing my mother, whom I hadn't seen for two weeks, come through the door with a bundle in her arms.  I remember unbearable tension.  That's all.  The story makes it so much less - a funny ancedote, not the painful, confusing,  huge shift in my life. 

I don't believe we need to get our memories back.  If we need them, they'll come to us.  But they are not us.  They are stories that may or may not be true.