“Nostalgia is the sweet halfway house by which you love the past and the sweet things in it without actually committing yourself to the nonsense that life was better then.” - Henry Mitchell from Memories magazine, and featured in the Points to Ponder column of the May 1997 issue of the Reader’s Digest.
Do you treat your goldfish well? You should. Apparently they have very long memories. They can even pine for their caregivers when they’re away. This is according to a story that was reported in The Sunday Times of London by a vet down in Tasmania sometime back. I’ve often told you about our fish in our backyard pond. They can hibernate through a long, cold winter, and when spring comes, they’re back up at the surface doing a lot of the same things to attract my attention they did the year before. Some years back, my daughter taught them how to eat the food right out of her hand. Even after months of sleeping deep in very cold water, they remember this little trick come the spring.
My memory is not what it used to be. I try to recall information for this show and find that I can’t remember the original source. Our lives are so filled with information overload that it doesn’t surprise me that some memories are elusive.
If you’re having trouble remembering what happened a week ago today, you might want to consider some kind of journal. Besides the obvious, there is another reason….
“A journal is more than a memory goad. It’s therapeutic. The act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential thought patterns that best define us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us.” - Randy Wayne White, from Outside, quoted in the Points to Ponder column of the January 2001 issue of the Reader’s Digest.
This is one of my favorite quotes. “The greatest legacy we can leave our children is happy memories: those precious moments so much like pebbles on the beach that are plucked from the sand and placed in tiny boxes that lie undisturbed on tall shelves, until one day they spill out and time repeats itself, with joy and sweet sadness, in the child now an adult. Memories. Love’s best preservative.” - Og Mandino from The Choice, published by Bantam, and featured in the Points to Ponder column of the July 1994 issue of the Reader’s Digest.
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Don Jackson
