What do you choose to remember?

I began my daily walks in the late 1990s. Then FaceBook came along, and then I got an iPhone, so now, I can take a photo each day on my walk, and easily post it to FB. (If you'd like to see some, click here.)

Last weekend, my husband and I went to visit friends in Las Vegas -- well, technically N. Las Vegas. N. Las Vegas is a sort of sprawling suburb that was all built in the last building boom (90s? 00's?), the kind where large houses are placed on small lots inside defensive walls (what are they defending against?), with tract names like Hidden Gardens.  If you want to walk very far, you are forced to walk outside the defensive cement block walls on 6 lane boulevards with left turn turn-out lanes. (The photo to the left is what it looked like where I was walking.)

I went on my morning walk each day. You could
see lovely mountains in the distance, but partly because it's the desert and partly because of the walls and boulevards, and partly because the iPhone has no optical zoom, it was difficult to find something I really wanted to share on FB. I did, eventually manage this photo (on the right) by showing a lot of sky. I like it much better -- more peaceful, more beautiful.

And that's when it hit me: We have a choice about what to remember and how to remember it. We can choose to remember the unvarnished truth, up close and personal, or we can choose to remember the best version of an event -- or the worst. Yes, the large stretches of asphalt and the cement block walls are there, along with the power lines and street lights -- and we can choose to focus on the snow-covered mountains instead. (Or as our host said of my photos of The Strip, "You make it look so much better than it actually is.")

When you think back over your life, what are you choosing to remember? Are you choosing to remember every time you messed up, or every time you succeeded -- or both? Are you choosing to remember every time you were slighted, or every compliment paid to you, every kindness done to you? Or both? How do you hold the 'negatives': as a victim, or as things you can learn from? It's all your choice -- and one set of choices will make you happier than another. (BTW, it's possible to shift these memories -- if you'd like help, call me at 888-4-hollis.)

Context is everything!

Sometimes, context is everything. It’s how you understand the meaning of a given word, right? When I was a kid, we played a game where the words “coffee pot” were substituted for two versions of a homonym, and you had to guess what the words were. So my mom would say, “I coffee pot the ball” and “I drove coffee pot the tunnel” and I had to guess the words “threw” and through”.

And sometimes it’s how you recognize people. Bear with me, here.

My office is very private. It’s pretty separate from the house; it’s downstairs, behind the garage, with its own door to a private patio. The patio is accessible only by a gate to the front yard and stairs up to the main deck and yard, which I can see from both my desk and the sofa where I sit to “read”. No one ever comes in unless I invite them. Even my husband checks the phone line to see if I’m busy before he comes down, and he comes from the inside; there’s never anyone except the cable guy or the phone guy on the patio, and that’s because I’ve called them. When I work, the only other creature there, besides me, is my cat, Creature. That is, my office is very private, and very safe -- which is important, because I need to be completely secure in the outer world so that I can focus on the inner world for/with my clients.

Last Wednesday morning, I was in my office, doing a reading/NLP session for a client. I had my eyes closed, paying close attention to the inner landscape, and was therefore not particularly aware of what was going on in my office. All was well. We had gotten to a place where my client was touching one of his big issues, which, frankly, he would rather have avoided. (This is how many issues get to be big issues — when they’re little issues, we avoid them because it’s easier or more comfortable to avoid them than to deal with them. That lets them grow unchecked, attracting other experiences like the one that caused the issue in the first place. But I digress.)

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Went the back of the patio door.

Oh, my God! I practically screamed into the telephone, and then apologized to my client for blistering his ear as I rushed to the back door. There was a man standing there! And all the possibilities of who this could be flashed through my mind (PG&E? PacBell? The cable company? But I haven’t called any of them. A new neighbor? But why would a new neighbor come to this obscure, protected door?)

“Who are you?”, I asked the stranger.

“Steve”, he answered, with a slightly shocked look, as if to say, “you idiot!” — and immediately his very ordinary features morphed into the unique ones of one of my best friends from decades ago, as if all my experience of him suddenly populated his face. (Actually, we’ve known each other since we were teenagers and have stayed in touch all these years. No, I haven’t seen him in 5 years, but he really doesn’t look different from how he looked then.) It’s just that I talked to him the evening before, on his home phone, in NC, to say “thank you” for the birthday present he sent, so I “knew” he was home in NC. Since I didn’t expect him, I didn’t “see” him. I explained that I was really “out there” from doing the reading, and he readily forgave me.

How do you prevent this from happening? How do you ensure you recognize someone? I’m not 100% sure you can, but I have a couple of ideas.

The first one comes from my late father, who was a doctor in a small town in NJ, with a huge practice which spanned the state. Almost everywhere we went, someone would say, “Hi, Doc!” and he’d look momentarily blank, and then greet whomever by their name, and ask them something relevant to their lives. Once I asked him about that blank look, and how he remembered everyone, and here’s what he said: “When someone says, “Hi, Doc!, I know it’s someone from my practice, so I “see” them in the office — and then I know just who they are, their name, what they do for a living, kids names, all that stuff.”

So the first trick is to widen the visual frame of your memory, to see someone in the context in which you met.

The second trick is from “memory experts” who tell us to envision someone’s name stamped across his or her forehead.

Put the two together, so you see the person’s name, stamped on his or her forehead, in the context in which you know each other, and you’ll be all set!