As I hit publish on the piece falling yesterday, I was visited with the memory of recording my very first song which, of course, had very little to do with the piece written yesterday.
Honestly? I’d forgotten the event entirely. But fragments of the song came back and I couldn’t figure out until this morning why the song sounded familiar.
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I had a sudden flashback this morning of a restaurant that I never actually went to, but passed nearly every weekend as a kid as the family drove from the Twin Cities metro area to a cabin my aunt owned in Minnesota’s northwoods. The restaurant was heavily advertised on the route by way of billboards and driving by the venue itself was usually enough to trigger a flurry of requests to stop for dinner.
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I haven’t heard John Denver’s song in multiple decades (until today) and yet… It comes to mind for whatever reasons such things come to mind when I started to think about my impending road trip beginning about midweek. It doesn’t even fit with the theme in which the song was thought to be written for, which is generally how these things work. I’m not going off war, nor standing outside the door of a young beau looking for a last kiss before I leave, and I plan to be back home by the end of next week (so I know when I’ll be back again).
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I used to be really proud about how clever I could be and how much information I was able to amass in my cranium.
The past decade or so, however, I’ve been discovering how liberating it is to be the one asking questions instead of being the one who “knows” stuff. And how freeing it is to let “knowledge” slip away when the information does not have an immediate and proven need. I can always ask the questions, or read something, again and — sometimes, even — I learn something completely different when I learn something “from scratch”.
That means I can often reread books, for example, and see the story or the information with completely new eyes. Or find a new technique to troubleshoot a problem.
Forgetting doesn’t have to be the horror that some folks make it out to be. Memories are not something that require preservation. They may give you joy or feel useful, but there is no real reason to cling to memories, or that joy, just for the sake of remembering. Or is there?