Memory is a strange thing

Yesterday I found myself reflecting on high school. I found this odd since I rarely think about high school. Socially it was a throw-away experience for me and most of what I learned had to be unlearned in order for me to become the person I am today, whom, for the most part, I am happy with. It's strange because with that revelation I realize that the freeze frames of the people I knew then don't exist that way anymore.

The world keeps turning even when you're not paying attention. Those people have spouses, children, houses. They're older than people I meet now that are older than my memories of them. I'm older than "adults" I looked up to then. There are people I am friends with in memory. We are not friends now.

Then again there's the fallibility of memory. Perhaps I was never friends with those people. Perhaps others considered me friend as I forget them. I can't confirm what I can't remember whether I was there or not. So I try to make a list of the people I knew, the people I enjoyed being with and I stop. I am not the person I knew.

In high school I recall reading about how your body replaces itself every seven years and thinking "in seven years my body will be dead and gone and replaced with a new Phil" (further research puts that number closer to 15). That thought terrified me. At the time, I liked Phil. He felt he was comfortable in his own skin, he liked his friends, and nursed ideas of becoming a writer for a living. But eventually, he did die and the man that replaced him doesn't like him. He doesn't like a lot the friends that Phil had and has the opinion that Phil was, in fact, quite uncomfortable in his own skin.

On the upside, new Phil did learn.

It's good that memory is finite. I don't think we'd evolve as smoothly if we didn't forget. Holding on to old memories, old ways of thinking, things that are gone and dead chains you to those things. The world keeps turning. It's probably a good idea to turn with it.