How many days do you remember? I remember about six. They all seem to blend together: wake up, curse my bad luck, roll over, wake up again, feel mild disgust at the taste of my mouth, brush my teeth…all the way until I fall into bed again at the end of the day.
I realized this year that life is really just a few long routines blended together. Do I really remember every day of the last year? No! My memory, rather than a calendar with little entries for each day, is like uniform blocks of code. There’s a block that loops through high school, one that concatenates college, one long rainy-on-repeat day that represents my year in Boston, and a still-evolving block of my life in Philadelphia. The individual days are like little loops within those blocks, with only a few exceptions that break up the monotony.
The things I really remember about my own life aren’t the things I’m told are important. They’re not the accolades, the report cards, the paychecks, or the record-breaking social media posts (not that very many of the latter exist). They’re some of the most eclectic and mundane moments imaginable: a time when a complete stranger yelled at me on the bus; the ongoing scorched-earth campaign Kennedy and I are waging against our slow cooker (we are scoreless, while it has racked up an impressive streak of ruining our barbeque chicken); the first time a professor chastised my lab cleanliness and I agonized for hours over an apology email; the inevitable irony of locking myself out of my apartment on the one day my roommate was traveling…
The memories that rise to me unbidden aren’t my successes. My strongest memories are my mistakes. It seems like failure is one of the only things* that can pierce the fog of my memory, as if these are the bugs that break me out of an otherwise endless loop.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I’m grateful that life (and neurobiology) are good at preserving these moments for me. But this realization precipitated an epiphany for me: if I don’t make mistakes, I won’t remember anything about my life except one long routine. And, more importantly, if I can’t live with — and even enjoy! — my mistakes, then I won’t have too much to remember fondly. So I’m trying to live so fearlessly that I can’t help but make mistakes, over and over again, and I’m trying to laugh at myself every time, so that these will be happy memories in the end.
Life is a long routine, punctuated by memorable mistakes. Therefore, make mistakes with good humor — and great frequency.
*See Part 2 for a qualification.