How we remember the past matters

It’s September!

I was reflecting on the expanse of time that was summer, what did I actually do?!

Summer feels a lot more of an expanse that it once did during school days. Summer isn’t a six-week event like it once was. Summer is now four months long. It’s punctuated by opposites: working and holidaying. It holds the same excitement levels as it once did, however, it often doesn’t look very different to the rest of the year…especially if you experienced this year’s British summer.

As a freelancer, and someone who can naturally be quite hard on myself, I decided to remember all the projects i’ve worked on this summer. I put all the photos I took during the summer months into a video, and to my surprise, I was blown away with how much I had worked on, most of which I had completely forgotten or discounted.

It was interesting to me that my instinct was to assume that I hadn’t done enough, or at least done as much as I should have.

I was chatting to a friend recently about how, when we’re asked the ‘how are you’ question by people close to us, we can’t help but tell them the negatives.

When asked how was the beautiful wedding I recently shot I replied “long”, as if I hadn’t just witnessed a really stunning, personal wedding and had an amazing time shooting it. Granted, I was absolutely shattered by the end of the wedding, but I had allowed the lasting note of this experience to be the only note by which I remembered it.

It matters how we remember the past.

Perhaps this seems inconsequential. My remembering of small days in the grand scheme of my life probably isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. However, I can’t help but see that my pattern of accumulating negative remembrances of past events, can accumulate into narratives and my narratives accumulate into belief systems and worldviews which, to complete the cycle, are the things we live by. Beyond yesterday, beyond summer, i’ve found that it’s dangerous to let skewed remembering make us feel like victims of our circumstances, circumstances that were not actually bad to begin with.

To counter this, I’ve been consciously practising balanced remembering. Not all-good, not all-bad. I’ve been trying to let the past sit better in my mind. Somewhere neutral, somewhere in-between. Using my language in more of a nuanced way to reflect on how the day actually was, not choosing the easiest word to reach for, but the truest one. I think how we remember the past really does matter,

how was your summer?