To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, June 06, 2019
 

I was interacting with this person in some temporary work context for the third time in about two weeks. At some point during the interaction I realised that he did not remember me from the previous interactions because he was explaining certain things like he hadn’t explained them before. Now, I myself have this problem of forgetting faces and names. It’s one thing to forget a name but quite another to forget a face. Knowing this tendency, I generally smile in return when people smile at me knowingly, being quite sure I must have had some interaction with them at some point. Many a times I have a vague sense that I know them from earlier but can’t quite remember in what context… this sense guides me to act in a slightly more personal way till something goes click in my head and I remember. Even in the light of my own failings, I found this particular person’s complete lack of recollection quite extreme.
Funnily, I was somehow reminded of the movie ‘50 First Dates’. I watched it so many moons ago that I don’t remember anything other than the general contour of the movie and even that might not be exactly right. The essence of the movie from what I vaguely remember is that the heroine has Alzheimer’s (or something similar) where she can’t remember one day to the next and the guy who is her husband or fiancé takes her out on a date every day as if it’s a new date because in her mind at least there is no memory of a previous one. I guess this movie was brought home to me when I sensed something surreal and uncomfortable in my interaction with this person who I thought I ‘knew’ in some way but who interacted with me like I was a completely new person; I couldn’t help thinking about how significant “shared memory” is in building a relationship, any relationship.
It seems to me that every moment that is spent with a person be it in silence or in communication sort of adds up in some way to a shared history that is the accumulating backdrop against which all successive encounters or interactions occur. Whatever is said or understood in a future interaction is against this backdrop which gives the future interactions their own specific meanings and those meanings in their turn keep building onto the backdrop. Imagine meeting a person with whom you share history but there is no common backdrop at all because of loss of memory and you have to carry out the emotional labour of creating the history or backdrop all over again! But there would be no point in a way of doing it because the backdrop must be supported by the shared memory, however imperfect, of both parties. You might as well simply approach the encounter as a temporary or transient one building every communication message with independent (as opposed to contextual) meaning like strangers meeting on a train with whom you have some passing pleasantries or animated discussions that you might remember or forget as a personal memory rather than a shared one (if you meet this stranger again and remember the personal memory it might make way for a shared memory I guess).
Makes me wonder why people seek the excitement of new relationships in place of old comfortable ones with strong shared memories and enduring backdrops? Nothing to say that you can’t develop strong shared memories or enduring backdrops with new people but isn’t it too arduous an emotional task? Also, I would imagine the more the number of people you have to support this shared memory with the more superficial the shared memories must be? I guess many people might actually find the exercise of creating new backdrops however flimsy exhilarating and exciting as opposed to the rather mundane task of supporting or in some cases revitalising an existing edifice. To me the mundane task appears more emotionally fulfilling though…but that should be no surprise to my readers :)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:29 am 2 comments
HOME