Remembering These Times - Look at Your Camera Roll
Memories are strange things, prone to distortion, rarely fully accurate. Two people can have totally different recollections of the same event, depending on how they encode it (choose to perceive it, how much attention they pay to it), store it (consider it important or useful) and retrieve it (appropriately or effectively access it again when needed). The emotional intensity of an experience is key. Often, we have much stronger memories of the slights, the criticisms, the bitter rejections, the failures in our lives than any praise we have received. When Mrs Bennett held my grubby, lopsided knitting up to the class in primary school, I felt the humiliation and I can still feel it now if I let my mind go back there. Perhaps it is because we choose to replay these negative situations endlessly rather than just let them go. We blur the facts and retrieve the feelings.
Sensory elements also play a huge part in our memories. Hearing a song on the radio can instantly take us back to our teenage years, the taste of a particular food can evoke a favourite holiday, a smell can conjure up a whole lifetime of experiences. I will forever associate that slightly damp, dusty fragrance of second-hand bookshops with my entire childhood.
Most of us are also familiar with unreliable witnesses or even false memories. There is a great anecdote in Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking of an inflammatory political comment George W Bush made after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. The story was told by an eminent writer and media personality, Neil deGrasse Tyson and it positioned Bush as a dangerously irresponsible President. It gained much publicity yet on investigation, the comment could not be found anywhere - not in any statement or speech Bush had made at the time. Tyson was adamant he had heard it, yet it had never actually happened.
This is an extreme example of a fictitious memory but in many ways, that’s why “we are all in this together” is such a trite thing to say. Yes, we are all living through Covid-19 but we are all experiencing it and responding to it in very different ways. We are all creating different memories.
How will we remember the last few months? Obviously, this will largely depend on individual circumstances. For those who have suffered great personal and professional loss, that will be the sole marker of this time. We cannot under-estimate the human cost. Those will be incredibly hard memories to bear. For some, so much change and uncertainty will only allow emotions of fear and anxiety to be recollected. For others thrown into home-schooling and childcare juggles, it will be about chaos, inadequacy and even despair. And for many, the Covid-19 lockdown will just be remembered as weeks and weeks of extreme monotony, endless repetition with no ability to plan and all spontaneity removed.
But perhaps our camera rolls can tell a different story? How we recall these times may be transformed if we can just engage in a simple process of reflecting on what is stored on those mobile devices we carry everywhere.
Last weekend, I downloaded all the photos I had taken from March to October 2020 and I started to browse through them. What I had thought was the same day repeated over and over again turned out to be a period of immense richness and so much blessing. The important point though is I could not see that whilst living through it in the present, only by looking back at it in the past.
It was in summary, a series of moments. There were no big events with mostly everything cancelled. But, there were numerous sunrises and sunsets, blossoms sprouting in the Spring changing to leaves falling in the Autumn. There was proof of the coping strategies we had used - baking frenzies, jigsaw puzzles, cheese boards! There was evidence of the step by step stages needed to produce a rainbow cake, including a blurry shot of the layers rising through a dirty oven door and the intense anticipation when the knife cut through and, to much relief, various distinct colours appeared. There were glimpses into relationships - two sisters with wildly contrasting personalities, companionably setting off on a bike ride in the sunshine, an eldest daughter intricately French-plaiting the hair of the youngest, all four girls toasting marshmallows together over a fire in the darkness.
There were examples of the community spirit in our neighbourhood including ribbons of hope tied round trees, pictures of rainbows in windows to support the NHS and the amazing display of Teddy Bears in Maurice and Jenny’s garden (and no, I did not know their names before this) which became a local attraction, with a new scene appearing on a daily basis. There was lots and lots of eating - the random sushi ordered one mundane Friday lunchtime, the boxes of Pringles stacked up ready to topple at any point, the raspberry and white chocolate scones left at the gate by a wonderful friend. There was even a photo of the bins in the street (yes everyone knows the bins have gone out more in 2020 than anyone else). Finally, there were photos of lots of pale faces huddled on Zoom screens, people in the workplace forced to work and communicate in bizarre ways, desperately trying to remain connected and desperately trying to remain calm.
Through my camera roll, I see a family who learned to better enjoy and appreciate each other and I see colleagues who mean so much to me and whose companionship (albeit virtual) has been a lifeline over the last few months.
My camera roll has taught me three things:
1. We cannot rely on the big occasions - it is the many small moments which build the lasting memories and which can bring the most joy in our lives.
2. We all have our own individual camera rolls - each of us will have our own personal memories of this time and each of us will carry these with us for a very long time.
3. We can choose to create our memories - by choosing what we capture on our camera rolls, we choose what becomes encoded, stored and eventually retrieved from our memories.
And so, if you haven’t done it yet, go back to March and start to scroll through your camera roll. You may be surprised at what you find.
