a love letter to memory
sometimes i think i have a bad memory but that's not really true
last month, on a trip to japan, in the most beautiful inn i’ve ever stayed at, in one of the most beautiful towns i’ve ever been to, i stared out of this window for many hours.
when i vacation, when i explore new cities, i am a go-go-go person. i’m a doer. i like walking around neighborhoods, eating food from as many places as possible, ducking into as many bars as possible, exploring museums and landmarks, meeting new people, and hiking too if i can. i’m not someone who lounges or particularly enjoys slow beach days and i’ve never stayed at a resort. but in between go-go-go stretches of days in Osaka and in Tokyo, my friends and i decided to stay in the very leisurely-paced Hakone to breathe. its green mountains, and my window looking out onto one of them, and the friends i got to look out of the window with were without-a-doubt the highlights of my ten-day trip.
the day we got to the inn, i got to spend a couple of hours alone with the window as Spencer and Katherine and Madhu explored the public onsens (which i could not go to because of my tattoos). in those hours, i got familiar with the proportions of the sliding door, the few objects on the patio, the shape of the mountaintops, the spiders which made webs on the railing, and the (so many) different shades of green in the trees. while noticing these details, i meditatively unpacked my previous few days, trying to recall as many details as i could, not wanting to lose any of them.
i do that a lot as an exercise, often on commutes or solo walks, reflecting on the things i’ve done and who i did them with and how i felt and what i want to remember. there’s a lot we’re all exposed to on a daily basis, it’s overwhelming. and as a go-go-go doer, it’s especially so. doing this reflecting and writing about it helps clear my mind to take on the next week. that being said, i get upset when i forget some details and there’s no way to regain the memories. it feels like there’s so much just lost to the wind.
i love asking people if they journal because it’s something i believe strongly in the power of. it’s a mechanism to introspect, to organize thoughts, and to record-keep. but it’s not just if they journal, i am curious about how often they journal, when did they start, if they ever took a break, why they do it, do they type or write by hand or voice record, if they stream of consciousness or is it more structured or something in between, what they talk about. and what they don’t talk about.
most of these curiosities, i ask about. the last question — what do you not journal about — is actually one i’ve never asked anyone. but it’s something i bring up every time anyone asks me about my relationship with journaling. i used to journal stream of consciousness daily starting in late high school and kept the habit for many years until halfway through my first year of college, the one in which i was very lonely and depressed, when i realized that my daily journaling was creating positive feedback loops in my emotions, creating a self-fulling prophecy of sadness, causing me to fall deeper into spirals of despair. i wasn’t letting myself forget; so i realized i had to stop writing about the things that were making me sad. instead, i focused on the things that were making me happy, the good things, and the things i wanted to keep. and now i have probably tens of thousands of words over the years describing things that have made me happy. one of which being this window.
the next morning, after a late night of playing card games, as my friends were sleeping in, i woke up early to spend more time with the window. i didn’t quite see the sunrise but i was close, and as i sat watching the world wake up, i saw these billows of smoke rising from many different areas of trees in the mountain (you can see them in the photo above, go scroll up). i was concerned about fires for all of 5 seconds before i had a flashback to the last time i saw something like this, during a sunrise during a trek in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where a guide explained that it was dew on the trees evaporating as it gets hit with dawn’s sunshine. it was beautiful and it made me happy and i had forgotten about it.
how wonderful! there’s many things that i love that i remember and keep in my brain for immediate reach: things like the smell of lavender, my loved ones’ smiles, and the concept of holding too many books at once. there’s many other things that i love — as i’ve described earlier — that i don’t keep in my brain but have written about: like favorite snacks of friends, pants i’ve really liked the fit of, and movies i’ve enjoyed in 2016. but there’s also this third category of things that i love, that i don’t have written down, and let myself forget about, and get to rediscover as i go about my life. like how i like watching dew turning to vapor in the morning sun.
so i guess this window taught me i should be more grateful for forgetting some of the good things. or at least less hard on myself. there’s a lot of joy in the world that i’m really excited to be introduced to, even if i’ve met it before.