memories

A Life Lesson About Tomorrows. How Many Are Left?

/ John / 1 Comment

What does tomorrow mean to us? I thought about that today. It occurred to me that I don’t have as many tomorrows left. As endless as they used to be, I’d grab at a new handful of them. For now, I’m glad to have the next one. They grow fewer every day (sorry, I had to put that in)

Young

When I was young, I never thought about tomorrow. It always came. Some took forever like when I cared about my birthday, and others flew by.

When something has an endless supply, the value is less. It’s economics. I never considered that I’d be working, or retired, or would have kids, a mortgage or any responsibility. Live for today. It was all about today. I had no real yesterday’s to learn from yet.

If I did think about tomorrow, it was the kid dream about being an astronaut or pilot (what I thought about).

That was so long ago and the days between now and then are so numerous that it seems, like another life for me. I’ve lived many different lives within the one I chronologically am still in.

School

I recall sitting in the classroom watching the clock ticking away. Tick, tick, tick towards when I’d be able to go home. Time was endless on those days, and this was just between 2 and 2:15 in elementary school. The only good tomorrow started on Friday.

By the time I got to college, I was aware that life was right around the corner. Still, I enjoyed the day without a care. I ignored that inevitable tomorrow. When it came, it was in the form of an exam, or a girlfriend or another event in life. It was finite and had little consequence as to what my next day held. Still, I had no real cares and a lot of what tomorrow brought was a new experience.

Letdowns started to happen, but the ocean of tomorrows never crossed my mind as I did stupid stuff. I think I lost a few tomorrows by taking too many risks. Somehow I survived and was able to live to the next day, always another tomorrow. It was expected.

Responsibility Years

Life marched on and I grew up, bought a home and started a family. Tomorrows always came, but now they came with other’s problems also. It wasn’t the carefree days when your kid is sick or in trouble. I didn’t have time to think about tomorrow as today brought 10 tons of manure in a 5 ton truck.

So much is happening in your life you take tomorrow for granted or you are too busy to think about anything but today. If you do, those thoughts are invaded with things you have to get done or do for others.

I did notice one thing. I was starting to have a lot of yesterday’s. Some of them happy and some sad. There were lessons learned on both.

The ocean of tomorrows was still seemingly full as it (now) quickly drained away.

Deaths

The first reminders of fewer tomorrows happened here. Those you used to know have run out of tomorrows.

When you are young, say at a grandparents funeral, you can’t comprehend time not being endless for you. By middle age, you know it is closer, but most choose to ignore the reality of time slipping away.

Growing Older

Rarely, do tomorrows bring something new to me. Occasionally, I get a different version of something I’ve been through. I have many more yesterdays now than the number of tomorrows remaining.

The kids are grown. The mortgage is paid off. I no longer work. I’m among the oldest of my relatives now. It brought me to how many tomorrows there will be. Among those, how many will be good or bad? Will there be tough times?

I try to enjoy the days, even if the tasks are mundane. I have less patience for things that don’t seem meaningful to me. My meaningful scale has changed dramatically over life.

From time to time (becoming far too common), people I know run out of their tomorrows. As I sit at the funerals, life comes into perspective for me, at least the part on Earth.

Tomorrows aren’t endless. You only come with so many. Some have more than others and some enjoy them more than others.

Most of life’s struggles are over, except what happens when the tomorrow’s are running out.

Here’s hoping for another tomorrow, and that it doesn’t suck for me.

Neurotensin, How Your Brain Encodes A Good Or Bad Moment

/ John / Leave a comment

I found this interesting in how your brain figures out what is good, bad, positive or negative and helps us act accordingly.

It’s pretty heady stuff, but the part about helping with anxiety, addiction and other things has great potential.

For Introverts, a lot of it happens in the reward/pain zone, the Amygdala…you know, the fight or flight place.

Here is an excerpt and a link to the whole article:

Now let’s rewind. You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. From the corner of your eye, you notice a rhino trailing the vehicle. Suddenly, it sprints toward you, and the tour guide is yelling to the driver to hit the gas. With your adrenaline spiking, you think, “This is how I am going to die.” Years later, when you walk into a florist’s shop, the sweet floral scent makes you shudder.

“Your brain is essentially associating the smell with positive or negative” feelings, said Hao Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Those feelings aren’t just linked to the memory; they are part of it: The brain assigns an emotional “valence” to information as it encodes it, locking in experiences as good or bad memories.

And now we know how the brain does it. As Li and his team reported recently in Nature, the difference between memories that conjure up a smile and those that elicit a shudder is established by a small peptide molecule known as neurotensin. They found that as the brain judges new experiences in the moment, neurons adjust their release of neurotensin, and that shift sends the incoming information down different neural pathways to be encoded as either positive or negative memories.

To be able to question whether to approach or to avoid a stimulus or an object, you have to know whether the thing is good or bad.

Hao Li, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

The discovery suggests that in its creation of memories, the brain may be biased toward remembering things fearfully — an evolutionary quirk that may have helped to keep our ancestors cautious.

The findings “give us significant insights into how we deal with conflicting emotions,” said Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the study. It “has really challenged my own thinking in how far we can push a molecular understanding of brain circuitry.”

How To Know Who You Really Are – Try Writing Your Own Eulogy

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An acquaintance’s father passed away a few years ago. He was an adjunct to a Five Star General in WWII and a press officer for IBM. He wrote his obituary and his funeral notice. It was spectacular. Not because it touted all that he had done, but that it was clear and concise. When my uncle died, I got that he was a pilot, but not much else and he did a lot of other things that would have been nice to hear.

It’s because someone else wrote his obituary. And there you have the key.

Write your own eulogy and find out what you want the world to know or not know about you. It’s harder than you think because you only have a short space to get in what are the highlights.

A BIGGER PROJECT

For me, it went to exploring the rest of my life and before I knew it, I’m writing about kindergarten or my 3rd job. No one will ever read it, but I finally found out that things like me being an introvert were there all along. My life would have been a lot easier if I’d have known the things I wrote. Sure, it’s hindsight, but the pattern was there. I wonder why it took me so long to see some things.

I remembered teachers (back to kindergarten), classmates, situations, jobs, life and so much that I couldn’t type fast enough. I knew I’d have to edit and re-edit for details and accuracy, but if I could remember it, I wrote it down. I forget a lot of stuff now anyway.

It fell out on the pages who was loyal or a back stabber to me. What was it that I expected or deliverd to friendships. Who I could count on and who I could count on to try to cause me difficulty or harm (mentally or physically).

I realized who was actually a friend and why, and who was passing through that time of my life, but didn’t remain. As I have said, there are a lot of characters in my autobiography who don’t make it to the end.

MY EULOGY

Guess what I haven’t finished yet. That’s right, the original project. I got so enthralled with trying to recall memories that sometimes would flood my mind, or that one deep memory that I hadn’t thought about in decades.

I’m going back to it as I need a break. It wasn’t just the writing, but having to re-experience feelings and situations that I’d buried were mentally taxing. I haven’t been blogging much as it has been overwhelming.

DO IT

Why? You will find out more about yourself than you could imagine. You think you know who you are until you write about your warts and missteps, the awkward things you said that you wish you could take back. Why you react the way you do instead of being more effective, especially when you are protecting your inner self.

I found out who I was and why I act the way I have. I got to re-visit a lot of times in my life. While writing, I put myself back into the 6 or 12 year old to feel those times again the way they were, instead of how my mind changed them over the years. Then, I thought if that moment affected my life later. Most times the answer was yes.

There were times I couldn’t type fast enough and had to keep a separate list of all the things I needed to write about. Conversely, I didn’t want to go back after vomiting up memories, joys and pain, success and failures in my life. I didn’t want to write the pain, but it felt better after having said it.

I’ll keep the eulogy, but delete the life story, no one cares anyway other than me. I won’t care soon either.

I guess I’d better get around to that Eulogy now so the kids don’t screw it up.

Life Is Happening To Me, And My Memories

/ John / Leave a comment

My posting has been light as I’ve been moving. It’s almost over. After I get the final truckload into a temporary storage place today, I can finally relax.

This has been months of ass busting to get things ready, turning me into a carpenter, plumber, painter and a no paid laborer.

After that was going through everything I’ve collected, including family stuff dating back to at least 2nd grade. A flood of memories came over me as with each picture or item, I felt the same emotion from decades ago. I also felt the loss of those who were there and are gone now. Some of the memories hurt, some were better. I decided to tell myself that I should be happy that I got to have the memory rather than let it tug too hard at my heart strings, dragging me down.

I had to throw out half my life. Those who will have to clean up my mess when I’m gone should thank me for doing it now for them. I had to go through all of my parents stuff when they died, which took years as some stuff was legal and I had to hold onto it, until this move. The final stuff is now gone, save for a few pictures and mementos.

My life is going to go through another phase now. I thought I was going to live my life out in the last 2 houses, yet here I am in a temporary place until the next one is ready.

It was a lot easier moving when you are younger. You have less shit that you accumulate and no one else to answer to. Now it’s “do you need this or do we need to keep it”. I had a lot more energy then and I know what to expect now.

When you are young and don’t know what is around the corner, it is an adventure. I know every phase of moving, including what is next, and that most people I have to rely on will be late and not really care about me except as a paycheck

I threw or gave away many thousands of dollars of stuff. It won’t fit where I was going and I got tired of selling stuff so I donated most of it to those who need it more than I do. I hope it serves them well. I’m happy if someone less fortunate benefits.

So by Monday, I’ll be as back to normal as I’ve been in a long time. Man, I hope so.

Back to the memories and moving adventures, I realized how freaking old I’ve become. For the first time, it’s dawned on me that the future is no longer endless. As each of us contemplates eternity, I hope you have prepared your soul. It’s way more important than a legacy

Reality bites us all in some way or another. I’m living through that right now.