I’ve written about this idea that I use in movement classes called “joy gems,” in which I ask you to remember in great sensory detail a happy moment from any time in your life. This stuff is important for healing trauma on a neurological/biological level. You can read more details about how this works here.
This is a share of a joy gem of my own with some thoughts on memory…
Moving into this house in this part of this city has felt like a string of miracles or coincidences or whatever you want to call it.
So much had to go right, had to be just right.
Now if you weren’t around during this or if you just didn’t hear me talking about it, when we walked into this house, I knew it was for us. Immediately.
But later it struck me that I knew that because it had the energy of one of my favorite houses of my whole life — the house of my GreatAunt Ardelle in Erie.
She was a special human. (Some day, she deserves a book (or two) written about how special and all the things she taught me, whether knowingly or unknowingly.)
One of my favorite things when I was very little was getting to spend the night at Ardelle’s. I would sleep on her davenport right off of her bedroom. The front of the house was visible as the whole thing was quite open and the front big window opened onto what was one of the busier roads in Erie.
I would lie there, not sleeping, watching the lights drift across the ceiling as cars drove by.
When I was little, there was something so very thrilling and also so very soothing about this.
The other night, here, in Columbus, 52 year old me could not sleep, so I made my way to our front room and laid on the couch, facing the big window that looks out toward the street.
Suddenly, the car lights were washing across the ceiling…
I had not noticed this before. I hadn’t thought about it as a possibility.
And there it was… like a beacon from little, 4 year old me…
As I was getting ready to write about this, I decided to look for a quote about memory and one of the first to pop up was this, by one of my favorite authors:
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never
realises an emotion at the time.
It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about
the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf
There is so much truth in what she says.
If you doubt, just think back to a day that was uber special — a wedding, a birth, anything of great significance — and think about how difficult it can feel to be truly present to it. How it’s so very overwhelmingly wonderful that it can almost feel like you are missing it as it is happening.
But later, LATER, looking back… there it is.
It’s this looking back at these sorts of moments that can heal us. And I think it’s a large piece of the puzzle of healing that can be missing, as we take so much time to “unearth” and “understand” and “process” the difficult things that have happened to us, which is important, but not more important than this… the work of constructing a memory edifice of light and love.
