Are our memories our life?

I think my memories are inseparable parts of my life. My past experiences, relationships, skills, and knowledge are stored in my memories. They play a crucial role in shaping my identity. They continue to affect how I experience the world in the present time.

But my memories are not my whole life.

In October I had a 20 days vacation with 10 friends. I had a wonderful time.  My memories don’t have my whole trip moment by moment. Instead they have some highlights of my trip. I shared some of my enjoyable moments in our Sunday service. If one day I become a grumpy person, I will tell you the trip differently: a friend’s phone got stolen, everyone got sick in the cruise ship, two storms, resulting in missing seeing Pizza tower and visiting Florence, last day when we were walking from hotel to the bus station, big rain and wind got everyone soaking wet.

From this example you can see:

• Memories are not all of life experience, rather, they are mostly high and low points of experiences. The ending point is very important in our memory. It almost sets the tone of a past event. If a painful medical procedure ends in a very painful moment. The patient will recall it as horrible. If the same painful medical procedure went all of the very painful points but ended in mild pain point. The patient will recall it as not too bad.
• Memories are not accurate. They are affected by our emotions when we store them, when we retrieve them, and when we save them back again, we alter them a little each time. Siblings experienced the same family event, but they could remembered it differently.

This brings another question, what happened to the experiences that are not stored in our memories? They lost forever!

What is why we do lot of things to preserve more life experiences.

1. We take lots of pictures when we are on vacation. That is a way to have a hard copy of experiences. But if we are busy taking pictures of a beautiful sunset, we are missing out on just enjoying the moment.
2. The relationships help us preserve our life experiences. We have lots of shared memories with our families and friends. That is why there is a popular tagline in the dating site, it says: Let’s build our memories together!
3. To make a memorable presentation, we pay extra attention to the high point and the ending point. 
4. When I was researching about this topic I got an epiphany, that is what meditation is about! It is a training to enable us to experience our life moment by moment. The past is gone, the future is uncertain, this  moment we are experiencing now is truly our life!