Memories- assorted thoughts that may mean nothing, or may speak to the depths of your soul

It's amazing the way memories work. I have a horrible memory. Ask my best friend Becca. She's always annoyed with me because I don't remember some key moment of our friendship.
Or ask my mom. Every time we talk I forget between one and three things that I wanted to say before I get a chance to say them. She loves it (this is an outright lie). Yet, there are so many random meaningless details of my life that I remember. There are so many things that I want to forget that I can't. There are things that trigger the smallest, most forgotten memory, as well as the memories I keep trying to let go. Sometimes it's a piece of clothing. Sometimes it's a TV show. Sometimes a story line or a location or a coffee mug or another person or a word. In my Crisis and Disaster course I learned that smell is the strongest trigger to bring someone back to their moment of trauma. How crazy is that?! Smell! Anything can trigger a memory.

Yet at the same time, in that moment that the memory is being triggered, we are in the present, making new memories. These don't change the old. Sometimes it feels like the new memory slightly dims the old one. Other times it feels like it brings the old memory flying into your face stronger than ever. But it ties the two together somehow. It's interesting, this idea of being in the present and past at the same time and from there stepping into a new future. It is just another of the balancing acts of life I suppose. So how do we balance it? We don't live in the memories. But we don't block them out. How do we allow them to inform our lives now and guide our future steps?

Some memories are people. Relationships. Past friends. How do you let go of someone you've walked beside? But how do you hold on to every person who has ever been important to you? Many people have impacted me deeply and are no longer a part of my life. How do I honor the memory of our friendship and the blessing they gave me and hold onto them, while still moving forward? Or how do I keep them in my life? How do we balance our multitudes of relationships while valuing each? Ah, this paragraph will be a post on its own one day, so for now I move on.

Memories seem to me to be inconsistent in strength, meaning, and sometimes even the event itself. They ebb and flow with the movement of daily life like a wave. They're here and then gone. They come strongly in response to a trigger one day, but another day the same trigger brings nothing. Some days the memory has a different flavor to it, one I'd never noticed before. There's so much depth to our memories and I often want to dive into that. Yet there's so much depth to our present- the place in which we are currently living- that needs our attention. We cannot benefit from our past at the expense of our present. But how do we bring them together?

I guess this was one big pondering for you all to join in with me. To close I quote one of my favorite books of all time:

You'll get mixed up, of course, 
as you already know. 
You'll get mixed up 
with many strange birds as you go. 
So be sure when you step. 
Step with care and great tact 
and remember that Life's 
a Great Balancing Act. 
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. 
And never mix up your right foot with your left.