Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I’m somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a “memory bubble” to me it’s like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc…) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.
This is how I interact with my dad’s dog.
Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I’m somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a “memory bubble” to me it’s like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc…) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.