If you could take your life and collapse it down into the memorable days, how short would it be? That is to say, how old are you in Life years? Just looking back over this past month, I cannot recall half the days because they were uneventful. This is actually a good month because I think I have lived entire months without anything memorable happening at all. That brings me to my fundamental topic though, which is what constitutes a Life day?
You are careening through life at a breakneck speed and there is really not a whole lot you can do about the actual passage of time unless one of those gizmos on Ebay really is a time machine. However, what would life be like if at the end of it all, you could only remember three or four days? The life worth living is an examined life, because the unexamined one is not worth living we are told. However, the life worth remembering is a life full of quirks and misadventures. You remember the things that happen to you that are out of the ordinary, and you are correct in assessing this sentence as one of my worst. Regardless, you have to put some thought into this.
I need to examine my Life life and determine the qualities of memorable days. I remember driving across a long bridge at daylight listening to the first words of Snow Falling on Cedars through my car stereo and the coldness held at bay by the windows, daybreak illuminating factory smoke beside the river, a streetlight flickering. That was one day, and at the time, I may not have known that I would remember it. I remember when my son was born, our doctor passed out hitting her head on the corner of the tray of instruments sending them falling in slow motion glinting in strange light, the anguish on the nurse’s face, the alarms and urgency in motion. I remember driving through moonlight, returning from a hunting trip, lazily rounding a curve as my uncle told me how his father had seen three bobcats at once while hunting in distant lands, and in the road sleeping were three bobcats. I remember walking two miles to the top of an overlook to watch the sun set with two friends, and walking the entire way back without light, worrying that snakes were poised to ricochet off my ankles, crossing a dry creek, flashing a light on a key chain and seeing bare ankles of a couple lying beside the trail, awkward words, then silence. I remember driving down a foreign road with friends, coming over the crest of a predictable hill only to find a field populated with the dry heads of dry sunflowers with a crow perched on the highest one.
All of these memories have one thing in common, which is that they happened with other people, except for the Snow Falling on Cedars moment. We establish meaning through interaction with others, so if you want to create a Life out of this life, then you need to do that with other people. I was also completely passive and observant in all of these, even the baby being born episode because I was beside myself throughout the entire thing. I was also not really expecting any of these things to happen, but I would say that I was open to them happening.
I shall try an experiment this week in manufacturing memories. I will not do that by financing a trip to Cancun laced with tequila, but rather by doing something completely out of the ordinary. I will walk mountain trails with a friend that I have not walked. I will try foods that I have not tried. I will talk about things that I do not normally talk about. I will drive down roads that I have never seen. I will learn things that I did not know.
