The memory is so good it remembers even the things you choose to ignore. It records the first smile your mother gave, your first kiss on a first date, bruises, grades, kindnesses, hurts and escapades; every nuance of emotion from gripping fear to jumping joy. The more you choose to remember, the deeper imbedded it becomes.
So soak up life. Sponge it up with all the gusto of the first home-cooked meal in a month. Eat foods so alive they burst and pop and explode inside your mouth, like meatballs made of Poprocks, like sour or hot or luscious spaghetti sauce, enough to elicit drool.
Ride your bike with abandon and speed until it feels like the wheels are wobbling off. Run with arms and legs churning as if a dog were nipping at your jeans. Then lay to look at the clouds and the sun, long enough for the whole panorama to transform as far as you can see. Drink it in like you did the coldest drink on the hottest day. Attach your imagination to it, until that scene changes and you become it; lose yourself in the wonders you’ve found.
Listen in silence to the world the ears offer. Separate the nuances of sound until the noise becomes one, then returns back to nothing.
Notice sunset, sunrise, full moons, winter brightness, blue skies over blue water seen through 20 feet up through a Tidy Bowl sea.
Remember friends, all the good things and even the bad; remember what they say you did, even though you can’t.
Take to heart and memory a whispered breath in your ear, as it moves across the creases, bringing the lobe’s hairs to attention and the hackles to dance beneath the hairline. Remember what was said, the cadence, inflection, emotion and the ripples it sent. Remember who said it. Remember the clothes and the day and the scene and situation. Recall where you came from, and from there, where you went.
Remember music and words and books and authors. Quote poetry, learn something moving to recite verbatim; a speech, a line delivered with such conviction that emotion quivers on the eyelid’s rims as it’s spoken, from both you and the listener and any audience present. Remember how good it feels to be alive. Recall how pain feels but don’t dwell in it.
Take in every aspect of every thing, the way a newborn sees for the first time; observant, patient, unhurried, mesmerized by the lines of a face or the whiskers of a cat, or the way the wind moves the drapes and how the shadows dance.
Remember that you have an endless supply of storage space in your head and take your life to the end in pursuit of filling it with places and friends, feelings and scenery, beaches and crashing waves, embraces and tastes and fragrances from the person whose lips lay close to you; the scent of skin, hair and mouth of true love when you know it. Pay attention, you’ll know it.
Check out the petals of flowers and their symmetry, their depth of color, detail, life, and consistency. Notice all the balance and beauty that God creates with and remember to say “Thank You.” See the hidden, hear the distant, touch the near, taste forbidden.
Remember manners and dreams and directions and birthdays. Remember artists and teachers and idols and leaders and the stranger who lent you a hand. Remember those who smiled back when it’s you who led.
In each day an array of seemingly mundane events occur, yet somewhere hidden in the work or TV show or demands from others is a hidden gem of what you must learn. Like each raindrop carries a grain of dirt, each insignificant quirk has something in it to learn from, so remember. Remember all that moves you, to tears, to joy, to sorrow, to euphoria. Your heart and brain were meant to feel those things; memory is the chain that links the life in little vignettes from birth to death, so remember everything in between as only you were meant to experience it.
