Your past is like a painting, one you remember starting, but not ever finishing.

I want to write about my life, not for the three people who visit my blog, but because I have to fill time, and in the hope that piecing it together will bring back lost memories. 

This last point is important to me because I often tire of the stories I tell myself and others about my adventures. They are all interesting, I believe, but I am also afraid that if I repeat them over and over, they will start living their own lives, one little exaggeration building upon another. I care if the stories I tell have some truth in them. 

But why would I doubt my own memories? I’m a sceptic, and as long as I can remember, I have always asked “why” if confronted with statements. Because many answers to why questions contradicted each other, I turned to other sources, and books are a great one. You cannot only read about other people’s ideas in other regions, but also from other times. If you read the literature, it is clear that we humans have a terrible memory. The problem with memories that primarily revolve around our own experiences is that we must be our own judge, and even if others were present and collaborated on our story, we still need to be cautious. One article I read, as an example, was about an experiment conducted by a young psychology student. He interviewed a group of people just after 9/11 and wrote down their experience, where they were, and what they felt. More than a decade later, he interviewed these people again and asked them where they were during that critical time. Several participants in this experiment insisted that their recollections were accurate, despite clearly conflicting with what actually happened in reality and with what they wrote down immediately after the event. They misremembered, but they were also sure they were right. 

Our memories are flawed, and there are many explanations for why this is the case. We are bombarded by an endless stream of sounds, sights, and feelings; we are unable to consciously decide what information is essential and what is not. Do you realize that the inputs from your eyes, ears, and fingertips all have a different distance to the brain and that their signals “arrive” out of sync? But when you tap your fingers on a table, you perceive it as something that happens at the same time, even though the sound and the signal through the nerves and air travel at different speeds. The world we perceive is built by our brain to give us a cohesive world to live in. I believe that our past is also presented to us in a way that makes sense and aligns with our current self-image. Our view of our past changes with our mood, you might say, and what really happened might be too much for us to handle. 

My point of this short introduction is that whatever I tell you about myself is the truth, but only for me and at this time. The times I drove an old motorcycle are real, and I might be right in thinking it was in Scotland, but that can be easily contradicted by the people who were with me; maybe we were still in England. What they cannot contradict are the sensations I remember while driving there, and I don’t call them memories but stored sensations. Every time I hear the sound of the same motorcycle, that little box inside me opens up and I feel the vibrations, the smells, and a streak of greens and blues passing by. Memories are for me like an abstract painting, the individual lines and strokes are meaningless, and only get their meaning when you step back and think nothing.