Memories, and why they'll rot you

This appreciation of life is a three stage process and this is how it gets to you.
You reminisce.
You think of time and its way.
You think of your own life. It's inevitable.
In the dark late at night, with the body prostrate under warm covers, you close your eyes and wait for time to gently roll you over the slope that is unconsciousness. When you fall asleep, you know nothing of the transfer until morning when you wake again. When you don't, you will find yourself becoming restless and more open to the influence of thought. With nothing to see, or feel, or do, you exist in a comatosed state with only the mind alive. After all, what can the mind do at such a time but play with itself?
So now that you have this infinite space in your head, what do you do with it? You remember. Yes, you could surmise the future, but conjecture always gets carried away with itself. It's fairy tale stuff that has a million routes to take. Fate will certainly lead you only one way, and if you've been desperate enough to consider too many scenarios, then your disappointment will be worse when you discover reality soon enough.
Everyone in the world is ageing at the same rate, no matter what their time of life, beyond a new century, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. You might as well be blindfold. It is a helplessness that is never expected to require courage. With so many other people involved, with all their potential for affecting your own life, the future is a dice with a thousand sides. Preparation and planning are not guarantees against mishap, only safety nets for the falls to come. So treat the future like the wind on the sail of your boat that floats on a sea to undiscovered experiences. Alternatively, the past is a refuge that can enhance the present and the future. Looking back through the years is remembering something that has already occurred, a type of dangerous animal that you once knew alive but you can stare at it and touch it because it's dead. You can resurrect a specific event without concern because you are now living in a time that defines it as history. The recent ones may be still too fresh to rest with comfortably, but the older ones are precious because they carry with them the dust of wishful thinking. The gaps in the facts are merely opportunities and you can complete the whole picture with colourful inclusions. It is only preferring to see your personal history as a containable story, a mental diary with some pages having too many dirty fingerprints while others are still clean. Fond memories will depress those whose lives at the present are not going smoothly due to the inaccessibility of the past, and discomforting ones will relieve those whose lives are smoother, for the same reasons. The grass is either greener behind you or with you, depending on your present fortune.
Then again, what is the present? As time is always moving, when does 'now' occur? It is a logical fact that no one can ever tell anyone else the correct time. If a man waiting for a bus asks another man the time, he will always get the answer four seconds later: Two seconds for the calculation, two seconds to be told. And if anyone thinks they can get round this by giving the time four seconds in advance, then all they have done is give the incorrect time, for they were not asked for the time four seconds into the future. And even if they were given an answer, it would still be incorrect. Even as the first sound of the first consonant leaves your lips, it is as much as history as the Pyramids by the time you have completed the sentence. One is recent history, the other is ancient history, that's all, the same as an ocean and a puddle are both water.
We are never really on the surface of the present. We are a few inches off it like a hovercraft, and the sensation of motion comes not from our movement, but by time that travels past us.
So now we know the future is hypothetical, that it is nothing but hope. We know that the present, because time is a progressive state, can't really exist, that it is only a moment ahead of the past and a moment before the future. With all the uncertainty of the future and the frustration of the momentary 'present', it's hardly surprising that reminiscence is so attractive. For those old enough, memories resemble an entire life already spent. It is looking at an existence that has survived, that is proof of the promise of longevity. The past is certain, unlike tomorrow, and happy times have solidified inside you like stonework to protect you from doubt for the future.
And this is where a devotion to reminiscence can enhance the future. We accept that the future can't be altered. But to remember the past is to look at life that has already been lived. The years of hours and days and weeks that have passed will come again in the years ahead. All destiny has to do is leave you free to live, which it does to most of us. So if the future can't be changed, the next best thing is to influence it. Not by material things, but by an attitude of mind that takes into consideration the three aspects of time; past, present, future. The momentary present, a term that by its definition gives past and future their meaning, is the only point from which to start.
Setting a date for the beginning of the first day of the rest of your life would seem so arrogant. After all, isn't every day the momentary present? So if you wake up one morning and decide to play with time and memory, be prepared to look three ways at once. Treat each day not as one before another to come, but one that will never come again. As your momentary present is your history in the future, you will want it to be remembered with contentment. Just by living life more fully, you will have an affect on past and future.
When you see a photograph of yourself as a child, you might perhaps try and stare into the face and look for a sign of acknowledgement that as the photograph was taken, the younger life was already prepared for the comparisons that would be made when the face in the years ahead would have more wrinkles and the eyes less sparkle. And is it really you? Well, it isn't, but it was. And now you are you, instead. And if you took a photograph of yourself today, you would not be you in twenty years time, but someone else. The same person, but not the same man. Life is quite prepared to drift on without your enlightenment to it, and looking at family photo albums is possibly the only way to jolt you to its travel. They are the occasional ramps on an otherwise deceptively smooth surface and date the progress in your life far more effectively than New Years or Birthdays.
Reminiscing with time enough to learn lessons can be exhilarating and beneficial. But some of us might pray that our last days will make us immune to the sadness of recollection and dead life.