Amnesia

Today, I was able to help a guy who needed to jump-start his car. It was a simple thing, but it brightened my day as much, if not more so, as it did his. I enjoy doing things like this for people; the short, one-time connections always cheer me up. And so when this one was done, I wondered: Why, given how much I enjoy these sorts of interactions, am I so bad at remembering them?

Back in April, I'd helped out a young woman who'd wiped out on her skateboard. She was pretty banged up, so I drove her to a nearby ER so she could be checked out. Again, being able to be of assistance like this had really brightened my day at the time. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

The fact that this sort of thing doesn't happen every day can't be the only factor. There are a lot of little events in my life that don't come along all that often, and don't have the same emotional resonance, yet I have much better recall of them. Or, to be more accurate, I recall them more frequently; ordinary, day-to-day events don't seem to be as able to crowd them out of my memory. I wonder if my memory of things in general is, in some sense, inversely proportional to the emotional content of them.

One's life is, in the end, basically the collection of memories that one has of it. I tend to understand my life as boring, and I realize that is, in large part, because I manage to remember the boring parts of it. Back in April, I spent an hour or so with the young woman skateboarder, and we spent a lot of time talking while waiting for something or another. I remember thinking at the time that she was a very interesting person, yet now I recall almost nothing of her.

So I wonder if I don't have it backwards. Maybe I've become so convinced that my life is boring that my memory simply dumps the interesting bits, even when those are the events, in the moment, that completely change the course of things?