Memory as a Canvas
Often I like to think about different thoughts or beliefs and how they could potentially impact our lives. I don’t recall what their fancier philosophical names are, but I do know some of the interpretations that derive from them. One of the thoughts I’ve witnessed online is “Everything is meaningless.” One way this thought can be acted upon proposes a motivating perspective, as to suggest that we should be empowered to make an action because every possible bad consequence that comes from that action will not matter in the end (that end being death). For convenience, I’ll name this the productive perspective. The other analysis of this thought takes the phrase and assigns it to a more concerning mindset; We don’t need to do anything because at the end of your life it will not matter if you did or didn’t do anything. I name this the pessimistic perspective. Both of these differing interpretations of the same phrase tie to one specific incident in my life. Because of the staying power of this experience, I’ve struggled with residing on one of the interpretations permanently.
On Christmas morning of 2021, I was robbed at gunpoint in my car at my hometown’s drive up ATM. I’ll never know if the gun was real or loaded, but assuming both, as I sat there with a gun pointed at my shoulder and chest, being ordered to take out as much money as I could, I quickly thought “I don’t want to die.” Staring at the possibility of death less than a foot away from my face, I finally understood what it meant when someone tells you that life itself is the most important thing. Usually I don’t share the story because I don’t think it's relevant or valuable without connecting it to a bigger system of thoughts. Every experience (like this one) starts off equal with another until we inject meaning into them, making them a memory. This remains true even if one instant appears the most alluring or “exciting.” Experiences cannot become memories automatically; They develop into memories over time and thought every present day. So how does this moment connect to my present day? That’s where these perspectives become especially relevant.
When a moment like this is recounted, the person who talks about its impact often says their appreciation for life and respect for uncertainty in life surges. I don’t refute this statement. But this feeling only lasted a short time with me. This increased my support for productivity. I pushed myself to try to “make the most of every moment” because “you never know how much time you have.” But after a while this mission faded for me; I receded to living with less attentiveness. Yet whenever I reflected and rewatched the event in my mind, I conversely entertained how nothing that I had done in my life leading up to the robbery would’ve necessarily mattered because well, I would be dead. This conclusion must belong to the pessimistic mindset. That particular conclusion never influenced my behavior for future moments, yet they did provide an out for any shortcomings. In other words, saying “it’s fine we’ll all die someday” to my failure in an endeavor helps me take the weight out of it. But even how effective an option this seemed to be, it wasn’t particularly tempting either.
The realization I’ve carved out is I don’t live through either perspective. I also haven’t fused them together, using each for their more compatible situations. In addition, I don’t subscribe to either anymore. I think of them from time to time, but they aren’t part of a set of beliefs that dictate me. To be even more honest, I’ll never be entirely sure how much the robbery truly influenced me. Certainly a large portion of it has been blocked, altered, and rewritten. The detective I spoke to said that my witness statement was far less violent than camera footage revealed. Thus, each moment I experience has a corresponding memory, and its canvas is painted by my current perspective. Whether my mind will revise its gallery is up to the artist I evolve into every day.
