Memories are so strange. At this point, I only have about 17 years worth of them captured in the billions of neurons within my skull, but this storage network is not like a basic file cabinet that I can just flip through consciously. Using that analogy, my brain is more like my old coworker’s office. He had piles and piles of seemingly random plans, specs, maps, design reports, permits, textbooks, calculations, and whatever the heck else an engineer would have strewn about all over his office. That might be fine if he just got hired a few months ago, but this process had been ongoing for the approximately 30 or 40 years he had been working there! No joke, it had gotten to the point where I would usually see him working in the conference room or a random open cubicle instead of his own office. Oddly enough, he could find things when he needed to.

With that in mind, it’s a freaking miracle that we can even navigate the world with all the stuff floating around up there. It’s also weird that memories are still stored somewhere even if we haven’t touched them in years. In an office at least you can always  (unfortunately) perceive the physical butt-load of stuff growing into an actual monster that you eventually have to hack away at with a paper shredder. Memories always seem to be invisible up until the moment they aren’t.

If you are reading this post because you recognized the picture, then yay! It’s a picture of Oxford Academy taken from the NW corner of campus near the band room. I just visited yesterday for no reason in particular, but it was definitely a nice experience resurfacing old memories.  We might have suffered through adolescence and a grueling amount of work over our years at Oxford, but in hindsight the pleasant stuff tends to outshine the darker moments. If not, then maybe the lessons learned can at least be appreciated.

To give a sort of mini virtual tour, here is a list of words that popped into my head (roughly in this order) as I walked around campus and maybe it will spark things in your memory too. It’s not at all comprehensive and I left out classmate names, but each word is related to so many other people and events that these words alone sparked a lot of memories.

Parking lot, spot 61, donuts, cafeteria, kids running, MPR, band, alto saxophone, Miner, Harlan, asking to formal, main office, breezeway, bus stop, ASB room, Vosskuhler, Siggson, Christensen, lunch spot, founder’s plaza, 7th grade locker 81, Choi, Matic, Ramirez, Stevens, Morrissey, Nguyen, 12th grade locker, lunch spot, cross country ab workout, weight room, old tree, Grindlay, art room, English building, Galvan, Taylor, Hodges, Erickson, Royal, Williams, Viramontes, Whitman, Chaldu, gym, basketball, Clifton, locker room, tennis court, bike racks, baseball field, track and field, running Patriots, PE, soccer, Ontiveros, cluster, Patten, Anderson, quad, library.

If anybody else were to do the exact same walk around campus they would probably come up with an entirely different set of words, which is also an odd thing about memories. Of course each person had their own unique schedules over the years, but even with the exact same experiences certain aspects will stand out more than others depending on the person. Even within the same person certain aspects stand out depending on when they visit. Why is that?

It probably has a lot to do with emotional state of mind, quite a bit to do with amount of time invested, and some to do with immediate suggestion, but I’ve been thinking about another reason that I will end this post with. I think powerful, spontaneous memories serve a very important purpose. They represent times when we asserted a set of assumptions about the world and acted them out. Our understandings of the world are constantly changing and are never fully complete, so maybe certain memories stand out to signal to us that we still need to learn something from them. We might not be able to recall what those memories are, but they are probably still there somewhere. What better way to trigger them than a quick field trip to the old breeding ground for all those angsty moments of adolescence? Sounds absolutely terrifying, but the good memories definitely made the overall experience beautifully nostalgic.