Some things I always remember to do. I remember to have breakfast every morning. I remember to go to the toilet during the day. I remember to get dressed before going out in public. I don't remember to do this things so much because of habit or tried and tested practice. Rather I remember out of necessity. My body requires me to eat. My bladder tells me to pee. My sense of modesty necessitates that I cover my body in public. Were I to need additional reminders to carry out these daily tasks I would no doubt be considered a candidate for medical or psycological attention.
Other things in life that require remembering can afford to depend on less important memory triggers. Practising the piano, birthdays, booking a holiday, recording a TV programme. Forgetting such things are less consequential. As such our brains are programmed to selectively remember what is important and what is not. And that makes sense because if everything had a number 1 priority then our brains would probably just explode!
But herein lies the danger. Having accepted a tolerance level of forgetting some things we can quickly begin to assign levels of importance to things that we deem unimportant but that others consider to be of vital importance. We have been caught out - actions we took, words we uttered that seemed insignificant at the time now call us to account. At this point we can become calculated and it is here that the real peril exists. Under the guise of emotional and mental survival human nature is very adept at driving us to re-remember those actions and words in such a way that we exonerate ourselves by revising what actually happened or was said. What we deemed unnecessary at the time has now become, to us, very necessary and in an attempt to divert attention away from our previous flippant approach, we convince our memories that our actions and words were in fact different from what we actually did or said. This is how we revise history. Fuzzy memories become fuzzy felt where we create scenarios that never quite happened that way because it suits our purpose. It isn't necessarily dishonest. But in the arena of personal relationships it can be very damaging because it erodes at our ability to give trustworthy accounts of ourselves. And without trust relationships are dead in the water.
There are always options. It takes grace and humility to accept when we are wrong. But accept it we must if we are to flourish in our relationships. Relationships that are worth their weight in gold are those relationships where the other person also has grace and humility to see that the object of their affections is supremely more precious than our need to win the arguments of the fleeting past.
