We are what we were. Every action that we take today is going to have a huge impact on who we will become tomorrow. When today passes by, it won’t just pass away without a trace. The footprints we left behind are what we call as memory. Some people may say that memory may hold us back from what we can be in the next future, but some also argue that it is one of the most important parts of our life. In my opinion, memory is the reason why we’re here, being ourselves, and living our role in this hectic life. Memory is the purest form of thought that has made us exist as a human being. Therefore, memory plays a central role in our life.
I believe that memory helps us introspect. Back to the days when we were still babies, our memories are empty. As the time goes by, we learn new things. We meet new people and interact with them. We get inspiration and ideas constantly and those make us grow better and wiser. More importantly, we fail all the time. We make mistakes. All these experiences may just pass by in a human’s life, if we never sit down and ponder about it. This is where memory takes its part; it helps us to judge our own action and learn from it. How can a man be better if he never learn from his past mistakes?
Moreover, human beings are capable to process things that they feel through their senses into something new and meaningful, and memory helps us to do it. Great thinkers such as Plato learned a lot of things from his philosophy teacher, Socrates. He remembered every meaningful question his teacher had taught him, and he compile a complete a new breed of thoughts based on his memory. In a daily basis, we also do this all the time. Every time we have an exam, what can we rely on to answer the questions other than our own memory? These examples show you how crucial our memory is to the thought-making process.
Well, I have to admit that if one thinks too much about a particular memory, it might hold one back. Thank God, as mankind, we are also given the capacity to move on with our life and continue living. We are made to learn perpetually and improve persistently, but we are not made to weep over things that have gone before our eyes. Memory is an instant reflection of our life; things we’ve done and missed, mistakes that we’ve made, all of them are compiled in fragments that we can access anytime for one sole purpose: to make ourselves better.
