O Memory, Where Art Thou

It's an almost weekly occurrence in the office that one of my colleagues will bemoan her terrible memory and feel certain that this is the first step down that slippery slope to complete memory loss. We expect memory and recall perfection of ourselves as if we were Wikipedia on its best day. It would be really amazing to have a memory that never let anything go, although it could be quite awful in a way. But that's another essay for another day.

Our memories must be at their personal bests in our early elementary grades, or we wouldn't be taught our multiplication tables then. When was the last time you heard a seven year old say, "My memory is so bad lately. It must be old age settling in." We know our memories weren't perfect then. How about at the mid-teen years when we are learning Algebra, Geometry, Calculus (not to mention that we know it all then)? Bad memories? Pitiful recall? I don't know about you, but my academic career wasn't famous for its endless parade of A+ grades. There might have been a couple, but I can't remember.

Then we grow up. We are out of school, raising families, working, trying to keep up with whatever we're supposed to be keeping up with. We have pins for our debit cards, credit cards, social networks, computer programs, bank accounts, phones, Amazon, Kindle, Snapfish, aol, Google, yada yada yada, and they are supposed to be different from each other so they are more difficult to hack. We aren't supposed to use our children's names, pet names, our names, the square root of an isosceles triangle, anything easy, so we invent something so clever for each of them that we almost can't remember them all. But we do.

We have better memories than we know, and it's time to stop bashing ourselves and accept that we have never had a perfect memory, even at our best, so we shouldn't expect ourselves to have a perfect memory now. If we can't immediately remember the top ten movies of 1976, or all the lyrics to "Some Enchanted Evening", so what? So what if it takes us a day, or a couple of days, or we have to look them up online? This shows us that we have learned one very important thing - that we can adapt, improvise, and overcome because we are awesome. At least I think that's the word I wanted to use...