Memory: are we letting the past dicate our present?

You know how decades later, we remember really clearly things from our childhood, teenage and early adult years? 

For example, I know I remember poetry and music learnt in those years, yet music I learnt new in the last 15 years, I have to almost re-learn from scratch when coming back to it only a year or two later.

My point is that the experiences in our formative years really imprint themselves on the areas of our brain that deal with memory (hippocampus; neo-cortex; amygdala).

This can be a good thing. 
As well as factual information retrieval, having clear memories of your distant past to memorialise relatives long dead or friends long lost touch with is useful psychologically. Memories to cherish. 

But it can also be a bad thing, depending on the subject and how it affects you now.

The evolutionary purpose of memory is NOT so we can remember the past in the sense of an historical record or a memorial or nostalgia. 
It's so we don't repeat stupid mistakes and negative behaviours, and so that we DO repeat behaviours that were positive and worked for us.

That’s why societal (not just individual) memory, is so important. 
Chaos ensues when we ignore or tear-up the lessons learned from the past with hubris (foolishness), as opposed to changing carefully and at a pace that that doesn’t cause chaos (wisdom).

When it comes to our socio-political views, we can find ourselves thinking and therefore speaking about them in a way that may have been true (as least as we thought) then, but isn’t true, or at least has changed significantly, now.

Views set in stone on important matters before our brains have finished developing (around 23 for most), and before we have had wide experience of society, will often not be nuanced in the way wisdom would require.

I was fortunate as a teenager in that, being a good singer and good all-round sportsman, I was asked to join clubs & societies outside of school, where I mixed socially with adults of all ages, classes and political persuasions.

However immature I’m sure I seemed to some, I benefitted and matured much faster for these experiences, than if the first time I had meaningful interaction with adults outside of my family and education, had been when I started my first job. 

Is the lack of these wider adult social interactions, replaced by online peer-group interactions, the source of much teenage and student angst for example?

Whatever, it's so important not to get sucked into having a closed-minded view, based on something we read, or heard, or were told, or experienced, often decades ago. 

Open-mindedness and a willingness to cast-off past views where appropriate, is difficult, but also liberating for you and even for others.

Difficult because it requires you to genuinely, in good faith, re-visit your long-held opinions and admit the need to change, which can be painful. Pride and embarrassment can be hard negotiators.

Liberating because, just the willingness and ability to try, makes you a better person, and who doesn’t like that feeling? 

But also because in changing your mind, shifting your position, even if only on some issues, and only partially, you are acknowledging the fact that society and individuals change, and that you are willing and able to adapt. 

We’ve all had some sort of epiphany in life; where we have a sudden light-bulb moment of realisation about something we thought we knew then realised we were wrong, or a problem we couldn’t fathom and now we get it. 
Even when the subject is trivial, it’s a wonderful feeling isn’t it?

Liberating also for others because, along with this more open, honest, free way of thinking, will come a change in your character; often materialising in a happier more energised manifestation of your humanity.
It may even nudge others to make some changes in themselves.

Now, it won’t cause joy or liberation to closed-minded people who feel comfortable (I would say trapped) in that mode of being, and comfortable with how you were before; your towing of the same line as them; your mutual bolstering of each other’s self-righteous, tribal, closed-minded egos.

But by being open-minded; genuinely exploring other views and possibilities; not seeing changing your mind as threatening who you are; seeing well-considered change as right, not embarrassing; seeing the past as something to learn from, both the good and the bad, but NOT something that should control your behaviours and views many years later, you become free; seeing things more clearly. 

A good practice for this is to steel-man a viewpoint you disagree with. To think as though you're going to debate in favour of a view you disagree with. 
Done with integrity, this shows you that other viewpoints are often neither stupid nor evil; even if you still, on balance, disagree.

So, as well as using our memory for memorial; nostalgia; error minimisation; and necessary information retrieval, let’s use it to reassess our values; our purpose; and how we interact in society. 

Importantly, such change doesn’t have to be seismic.
Drastic change often throws the baby out with the bath water.

I recall a situation, 20 years or so ago, when a couple married for 15 years and with early teenage kids split-up because the woman had had a cancer scare, and the reappraisal of her life changed her so dramatically, that, among other things, she ended the marriage. Her husband’s comment was that she became a totally different person. While this may have been right for her, there is certainly no need for that degree of change in order for the advantages of an open non-agenda-driven reassessment of your views & attitudes to show themselves.

For example, it can simply come in changing what you choose to do with your leisure time; how you express yourself; how you interact with others; being clear as to what is truly important; whether to change your job or work-life balance.

With open-minded calm reappraisal, putting defensive pride in your previous views to one side, you often gain insights such that new ideas, understanding, meaning and purpose outside of your usual routine, starts to emerge.

Positive purpose, not the purpose of the insular, the tribal, the ideologue; the activist zealot, which is ‘my way or else’. 

Rather, the purpose of the wonder-explorer, the wise traveller; the seeker of wisdom.

So let’s use our memory for the obvious things, yes, but not let it control who we are now; for with a questing and open mind, who knows who and what we could become?