People my age draw a lot of criticism regarding our memory. The critics don’t focus on the glorious memories we still have of things that happened in the good old days, but on the memories we don’t have of little things that happened just in the last few days.
Since we still have those recollections from the distant past, we needn’t accept the notion that our memory prowess is gone.
The problem is just that we have accumulated so many gazillion memories over the years, plus so many complicated new things to keep track of today. Our minds can’t help but be a little overwhelmed with trying to add new material to it all. If we think of our memory like a bank account, ours is not closed down, but just a bit overdrawn.
To prevent overdrafts on your bank account, you have to pay close attention to what you take out of it. To keep your memory from being overdrawn, you may need to think more about the things you add to it.
For some reason, fresh new memories fade out faster than stale old ones. Why can I still remember myself at age six running around with my friends shooting toy guns, and yet can’t clearly recall what’s on my list of things to do today?
Why is it I would probably be able to list more names of people I went to high school with (before graduating 66 years ago) than of people I worked with in my corporate job (before my early retirement 29 years ago) or clients of our home-based business (which we ended just a couple of years ago)?
Maybe it’s because God chose to make it easier for us to remember fun things than work things. (I like that explanation, because it implies that He regards fun as more important than work.)
Unfortunately, our preference for fun stuff doesn’t remove our need to remember the dull chores and obligations that fill our daily to-do lists. They require attention too.
Perhaps the best way to make it easier to remember the things we have to do is to convert them into things we love to do. That might be a big challenge. But what a wonderful change it could make.
If you try, you should be able to find a way to make every dreary chore more enjoyable – listening to music, enjoying some snacks, or hanging out with friends while you do your work. Add enough fun to work and it’s not work anymore. That should help make even a very lengthy to-do list much easier to remember.
If you have a long and complicated list
of tiresome chores you need to get done
the way to remember them all’s to insist
on finding a way to make each of them fun.
