Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.   ---Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, of course, is the famous physicist responsible for the General Theory of Relativity and the advent of the nuclear age with its ramifications for the planet.  Besides being a scientist, he was also something of a philosopher and had quite a few ideas about how the mind works.  This above quote of his rings true to me, as it paints people's memories as being subjected to revision according to what they are currently experiencing and how they interpret it...

What happened in the past, objectively speaking, is immovable and cannot be changed.  But memory is a function of the present time, whereby the overwhelming complexity of events that occurred before at a specific time gets filtered through one's own intellect, personal narrative, and subjective emotional bias to produce something that bears similarity to the thing being remembered...but in essence is really quite different.  We tend to "highlight" our past and distill from it the events that we feel contributed the most to our present situation as we see it.  Moreover, what our present situation is can also be seen largely as the product of selectively interpreting in a distorted way over a span of time what happened to us in the past and acting upon it. On a larger scale, the different political parties and social movements will consistently create a past that naturally leads to the present situation while affirming along each step their stated agendas.  Along with this, facts that would mitigate their criticism of other parties that they regard as adversaries are ignored because they don't "fit" the narrative. More personally, I rarely think about when I've been sick in the past, but whenever I do get under the weather those memories pop up in my mind, making me feel like I've been sickly pretty much my entire life, which is false...yet when I'm sick it feels that way. Once I've recovered, my "past" changes as I put illness completely out of my mind.  When I'm down on myself and others, I tend to look to my memories to find evidence corroborating this cynical mood.  And when I feel joy, gratitude, and benevolence toward others, I can much more easily find examples of this as well to paint an entirely different picture of my past...

The point to all this that people like to see the passage of time in terms of narratives...much like a story...and their interpretation of the past will consequently include memories contributing to that narrative and exclude those contradicting it.  Einstein was often seen as a "dreamer" and given to imaginative reverie, speculating freely about world around us and how we deal with it.  It's a shame he's no longer around...I wonder what he'd be saying about what's on the news and how it's being reported, along with the narratives being espoused...