How do you remember things?
I like to walk around the city 2 or 3 times a week and walk between 5 to 8 miles. I do it for exercise but also as an excuse to get out of the house. Often, these walks are paired with a good podcast or audiobook, but recently I started to try something new.
Last week during one of these walks, the podcast I was listening to ended, and I didn’t have anything else in my queue. I decided to just keep walking without listening to anything, and then something remarkable happened.
Out of nowhere, I started remembering things from when I was a child. It was me eating one of those unhealthy extra-sugary cereals and being very happy about it, holding one of my toys in one hand and a small spoon in the other. It looks me by surprise. I thought, why am I remembering this? Then I purposely started to dig into my memories more and more.
I was able to go as far back as kindergarten when I was at a table with two other kids playing with play dough. It was me with a happy face, opening a brand box of play dough with multiple colorful tubes of this fantastic product.
After several minutes of reliving memories from different stages of my life, I stopped and started thinking about how or what I can do to control my memories. For example, what if I tried hard and remembered all of the times I did something for the first time? The first time I drove a car by myself, my first kiss, my first day at school, my first job, first fight, first roller coaster, the first book, etc. I think you get the point.
What if I started to remember and write down all of these things? I don’t know about you, but this sounds very interesting to me, and I am currently in the process of doing it.
There you have it, that was something remarkable, and it resulted from not having something to listen to while walking. There is an excellent lesson to be learned there, and I am not going to attempt to know what that is, but something is inevitable; I will walk without listening to anything but my own thoughts, memories, and the sounds around me more often now.
What about you? What do you do to focus and remember specific things that might not come to mind often?
