Whatever we do in our everyday lives; our daily struggles, and daily pleasures, they all create our memories. Most of these memories are pushed back to the subconscious mind where they lay dormant until one day they resurface. You may be walking down a street when a sudden gust of wind brings you familiar fragrance of cherry blossom and with that comes a memory of your childhood. A song played in a radio may bring you a memory of your first love. Most of it is totally random. Not all of it though.
As the time goes by, each one of us lives and creates our personal myth- a story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in here. This story is like a collection, a kaleidoscope of our memories- the bits we pull out and pieces we stick together. It's a process of our self-creation.
In our relationship with the outside world we can become very crafty to say the least. We choose what we want the world to know about ourselves. We create an image, a persona of ourselves. It's rarely just one persona. We have our public or work persona, we have our distant family persona, we have an online persona, and many many others coexisting with one another in harmony or disharmony.
Take an example of your first date, a job interview or even Steemit Introduce Yourself section. What are you going to say? Which bits are you willing to reveal to the world and why? You need to choose wisely if you want to succeed in your goal. It is a skill and it is an art. These bits will be only half-truths, juggled and simplified to fit your purpose of a moment. But what about half-truth we tell ourselves?
Behind the closed doors, behind the scenes of our everyday lives, we don't need to act anymore, we can just BE. More often then not you'll be there alone with your memories. Sadly many of us have a tendency to dwell on the negative. We often envy those lucky few, whose lives seem paved with success stories. Unlike theirs, our lives are filled with countless struggles and failures. Sounds familiar? These are stories we tell ourselves. We forget they're just stories. Like all other stories they are only half-truths and sometimes even lies. Depending on how much you believe your own stories they will have a huge impact on your life.
It's not a secret that positive thinking is often key to success, but most articles on positive thinking relate to positive thinking about future. This is why many people, including myself, often struggle to think positive. If you got fired from your last job, you're less likely to feel enthusiastic about your future career development. If your last relationship went bad, you're less likely to trust your new date. You remember how difficult it was after all. Sometimes it is very hard to remember the other side of the coin.
A famous psychologist Philp Zimbardo spent many years researching different aspects of human psyche. Fragment of his time was spent studying nature of our memory. It turns out that many things we remember either never happened at all or they happened quite differently to what we remember. This knowledge is useful especially in forensic science since it has been discovered that witness interrogation sometimes lead to implanting of fake memories. Asking a witness "Was the accused dressed in red jacket?" more often than not lead to witness remembering red jacket, even though open question like "What was the colour of the jacket" would result in "I can't remember". I'm wondering how many of our own stories are filled with "red jackets" accidentally planted by our friends and relatives somewhere along the way. However unlike in court, in life absolute truth rarely matters. What really matters is your own truth and your own story. Would you like it to be a story of happiness and success?
If you say for example "I've always been good at maths" you might have forgotten that once in your fourth grade you failed a maths test. It doesn't matter. What about things like "I've always been bad at maths" though? Could it be that one failed test, a long time ago, disheartened you and you gave up? We rarely question ourselves on these things.
For most of us life is a tricky path filled with countless memories of achievements and failures. We fight our inner battles with our minds and with our bodies, trying to become what we want ourselves to become. This fight is the source of our suffering and also source of our inspiration. We can learn to use it to our advantage. Learning how to work with and reshape our memories is a great journey which takes most unexpected turns. I am going to explore it in my future blogs.