How my MEMORIES became POISON for me..

1922nd BLOG POST

I remember my childhood when we got our first landline phone. It was such a luxurious item to have in the home. I was so obsessed with it for years that when I grew up and created my first email-ID, even it had my first landline phone number in its username. I still use the same email ID which has my name suffixed by 6 numerical digits and people still laugh at it. We stayed in a colony where at the same time, almost everyone was getting the landline installed. The HR dept used to share the list of everybody’s name along with their phone number in every flat periodically. After a time, I had just memorized all the phone numbers allotted in the colony. So, whenever my mother used to search in the list consisting of more than 100 names, I used to ask the person she needs to call and dial the number directly for her. My parents used to be surprised with my sharp memory.

 

After a time, the company started allotting telecom sets to all the employees which made every one of us have two telephones in our phone. Now, because of my great memory, I was able to learn all the secondary numbers also. This made us very easy whenever we wanted to make blank calls to our new crushes from the guest house of our colony whenever all of us assembled in the evening to play together. It was all just to hear the sweet voice of that girl which would energize all the boy playing Cricket and trying to become next Tendulkar. Haha!

 

Well, days passed and then we got into secondary school where we got into batches with 100 odd students in two divisions. Everyone started celebrating birthdays. This again triggered the maximum potential of my memory which made me remember birthdate of almost everyone I knew. Later in life, I would also remember dates of every important event that happened in my life. My friends would get surprised during college days that how I can remember the dates so well. It was such an amazing period of my life. I would even remember when I met someone for the 1^st time, when we shared number and so on. WooHoo!

 

But as I grew up and certain wrong incidents started happening in life, the same memory became a poison for me. Because with everything good, I also ended up remembering all the bad and painful events of my life and that too in detail. The strength that I pursued all along started becoming a tragedy for me. It started becoming difficult to stay with all the hurtful and disastrous memories. Finally, I got into a long depression phase of 3 years which taught me enough about myself and what’s wrong with me. Reading certain books made me understand that attaching ourselves with bad thoughts can never help us move on and grow in life. Just after that I started putting lot of efforts in forgetting whatever happened with me during the depression phase to recover from it.

 

I don’t know how but with God’s blessings, I was able to move out of it. I don’t know how but my memory started getting weakened. If today, I have to tell someone about my childhood or the depression phase, I have very few memories of it. I don’t remember my classmates’ names anymore. I only remember a few of them whom I can count on fingers. And this has continued until now where I don’t remember many of my ex-colleagues and I have to put in lot of efforts to remind myself who he/she was and in what department he/she worked. Now, I am living with only few memories and most of them is about the spiritual concepts that I like thinking regularly and sharing with people around me.

 

You might get surprised but I don’t even remember the stories in the books I read after few weeks of reading them. Whenever someone asks me for any recommendation, I give them the link of my blog or online bookshelf and ask them to shuffle there and get their choice of book as per my ratings. This is certainly not good but when I remember what bad memories were doing to me, my mental and physical self, I feel the current problem of bad memory is still manageable. Before WFH, I always had an office diary with me which had everything scribbled on it as I couldn’t remember much about what happened in so-and-so meeting and so-and-so discussion. Whatsoever this is but it has really made my life a lot very easier. Now I don’t have to spend time in overthinking and ruining my mental health but it really helps me move ahead after every wrong or unwanted situation in my life. Even my meditation practice happens easily because my mind doesn't have much clutter to think about - hence it directly goes towards the silence I expect from sitting with closed eyes. And that is why I say – anything can’t be termed as Good or Bad and Strength or Weakness. It all depends on how it’s serving your life. Hope you could also realize something which wasn’t a great story for you but became great later on or was great but later became a poison for you.

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Thanks.

 

WRITING BUDDHA