In Passing

By Lisel Mueller

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.

I was incredibly moved by the writer’s ability to capture the passage of time, in a sweet, barely noticeable, melancholic dance of words reminding us that rarely does even an echo of a moment return. I am, and always have been, drawn to the melancholic. Yes, I am enamored with Dostoevsky’s writing (on a side note, does anyone create characters with depth, dimension, and human range like that anymore? Asking for a friend…), have always love the sad and delicate movies, and seem to feel a soft and familiar comfort in the thought that time is fleeting, and nothing lasts – despite my many futile attempts to move time just a smidgen faster, and other times, slow it down – feet dug into the ground, refusing to accept that another year has passed.

Forever a lover of art, I have often browsed the galleries of museums, usually most drawn to the impressionist and neo-impressionist works, entrenched in the details all while captivated by the lack of details all at the same time, and ultimately enjoying the feeling that is evoked. Ah yessss… my love for the dichotomy of things that often cannot co-exist, actually finding a way of co-existing. (Some of us really do always long for things we can’t have…) I have often thought “this is how I remember the good memories of my life.” When I think back to the moments that I want to store in my very precious vault, I often feel they have been captured in the the delightfully pastel, foggy, flickers of “I can kind of remember it, I can’t remember all the details but enough, and it’s a good memory.” Moments of love, seeing something I’ve dreamed about, nights shared with friends, the joy of seeing someone at the airport, the fluffy love of my life, the last dinner with a friend who moved away… all of it lives in my head, but in a dazed sort of magical way that feels a bit like a fairy tale. I do often write about being in the present and savoring what time we do have, but what I think I often actually mean, is that I’d like be present enough to be able to remember as much as I can, and save the feeling in that moment to feel again and again.

I actually have kind of thought I was a bit odd in my sense of this, although, it makes sense – pair our brains with some chemicals and the right place and right situation and BOOM! Beautiful memory. In all honesty, I was quite certain that others remember similarly. Recently perusing the internet, I came across an article citing that memories “are not a true or false picture of the past; they are like a Monet lily pond.” (https://nautil.us/your-memories-are-like-paintings-774424/) Ok… Hold on. Science and art in one pargraph – sign me up! I had a teeny tiny basic and general (kind of, sort of…) understanding of how the brain works, although recent discoveries in the brain’s mapping, insights into the state-dependent nature of our brain’s processing, impacts of present-perspectives shaping our thoughts, and our brain’s natural positive-bias actually appears to confirm that we do, in fact, remember things through the lens of fantasy, in an imagined world, that may have never existed. Memories are less like photos, and more like paintings that we create in our own minds.

Think of something that made you smile in the last week, or a song that takes you back to when you were 16 – what are you taken back to? I bet you’re thinking about that cool thing you do with your friend, or the trouble you got yourself out of, or something you did with a sibling or a family member, and other memories come in. Your current mood and affective state, will actually affect how they are stored back into your brain again! And, you might actually change some details of that memory in the retrieval and re-storage process. Kind of amazing and terrifying all at the same time…. It’s unlikely that you can or will remember the very specific plants in the corner of the coffee shop (unless you’re me and you’ve become a not-so-secret plant mom), or the color of the frames of sunglasses someone was wearing, or the shirt that the kid in the stroller next to you had on – so our brains pick and chose which details are important and which are not. Which makes sense that memories are more like an impressionist painting, rather than a photo.

I have been in a reflective, meditative, and channeling my inner hermit space lately, and in exploring the dusty depths of my own attic of memories, there have been many moments in my life that were “the last time…” which I had no sense would be the last time. There have been others where I kind of knew were the last times, and actively tried to make notes of it. In the hazy memories, I truthfully can’t always tell which ones were more or less intentionally stored, but I can say that the things I have lost, often, seem just a bit more precious, and perhaps their absence is what allows me to see them through my “impressionist colored glasses.”