The Greatest Gift

It's funny the things you think about in the car.  I had cause to go on a long drive a few nights ago, and two friends and I had settled into the "comfortable silence" part of the evening, usually reached after dinner, drinks, and wild times.  It's the comfortable silence of friends who don't have to talk to fill in the spaces, they can just sit together and think about.  It's in
those kinds of silences, alone or in groups, that I often find myself drawn to melancholy thoughts.  This was no different, at least not at first.

When the world is quiet, my mind starts to wander a familiar path.  The way has become very familiar to me as I think of the things I need to do today / tonight / tomorrow, and then what I did this morning / last night / yesterday.  Then come the "What Ifs" - "What if I'd said that to her another way?" "What if I hadn't asked him that?" "What if I'd taken 10 more minutes to...?" and that's a path that rarely leads anyplace good.  When I think back over my life, I feel many pangs of regret, but I've decided I probably don't feel them any more than everyone else does.  We've all hurt other people, made bad decisions, told lies, told the truth, or neglected to say something we should have, right?  We've all missed an opportunity that can never come around again, and we all feel the pain that comes with recognizing that.  I think that we all have this pain inside, each of us thinking about how bad we've got it and how nobody hurts the way we do. 
In that, we're all wrong.

Perhaps it was because I had 2 people in the car who represent a bridge that joins the two parts of my life, two periods I like to call "Happy" and "Now".  Maybe it was the gentle hum of the car's tires hitting the road or the eerie lightning in the distance, but most likely it was a combination of the two.  In that quiet, a simple question was asked and answered.  Afterward, I was hit with a rush of memories - some old, some new, some good, others bad.  These are some of the many memories that I try to bury really deeply each morning because they still touch on emotions that are raw and open.  I've learned one thing about memories - you can bury them deep, but they ALWAYS dig themselves back out.

For me, my very best memories are the ones that hurt the most.  For a long time, I dwelled on how horribly unfair this was - after all, I should have some memories, good OR bad, that don't stab me in the gut and make my eyes water with the pain.   Keep in mind, if my options are to sit and feel sorry for myself or to try to concentrate on the things that are good and right, it's MUCH easier to mope.  I should get a gold medal in moping.  Hell, I rock depression's WORLD.  On this night, though, I actually learned something in the midst of the sadness.

No matter how bad they hurt, no matter how much I might want to bury them and not think about them, these memories are part of who I am.  They are important, because they shaped who I was, and will go on to shape who I am and eventually will be.  Most importantly, these memories of times, people, places, and situations that are long gone are the only way that these things still exist.  These memories represent G-d's greatest gift to each of us.

Often, we see people robbed of things like their mobility, their hearing, or their sight.  These people struggle on, and many of them learn to compensate for this change in their lives.  The most tragic of all, though, are the people who lose their memories to age, disease, or a combination
of the two.  All the things that remained only in their minds then cease to be, so the world must lose them twice.

When we think back to people and places that we can't go back to, we're giving them life.  We're letting them exist again, in a little way, and we should treasure that.  It's one of the ways that the living get to make the world better, not just for us but for all those around us.  We have to try, hard as it is, to let go of the pain attached to memories and let
them flourish in the sunlight.  Where we can, we should share them with other people.  In that way, we can give the memories a life of their own, and they can live on after we are gone.