I forgot you did that

I am over 30 years old.  I have lived over 360 months.  I have lived over 11,000 days.  I have lived over 263,000 hours.  In that time quite a lot has happened to me, and for me to tell you everything would take a lifetime, quite literally as it would take longer to recount than it did to live in the first place.  At some point in your life you realise it becomes apparent that it isn't possible to know someone else's past in its entirety.  It becomes apparent that we each have lives to live and what matters more is not the lives we have already lived but the lives we live now and what we live together going forward.

When you are younger, and you have lived a shorter life to date, it becomes easier to "catch up" on what people have lived through before they met you.  At School, College, and University we meet people we want to connect with and we try and learn as much about them as we can.  Those first few weeks getting to know each other are spent talking about anything and everything we can think of that happened to us when we were younger.  The older we get though the harder it becomes to recount everything that has happened and we become more selective in what we share.  You eventually reach a point where getting to know someone stops being a case of telling them everything and becomes a case of asking "What do you want to know?" - that question for me was infuriating when I was younger because I always asserted that it's your life to live and everyone's life is different so how could I possibly know what to ask.  As I have gotten older though I have come to realise that question isn't offered in the attempt to barricade you from getting to know someone's past or to limit what you know by what you can think to ask, but rather it is intended to frame in a much nicer way the real question that person is asking you - "What do you actually care about?"

The older we get the more we realise we are not as unique as we like to think, that famous quote goes "you are unique, just like everybody else" it turns out that's not far wrong.  We all live through similar experiences in life and we all think the same way whether we draw the same conclusions or react the same way is irrelevant, if you've thought about it someone else probably has too, it's just a case of whether they will admit it or not.  Therein comes the reality of that question, asking what you want to know is a roundabout way of asking what you actually care enough about to need to know of another person before living your life with them.  I don't necessarily mean romantically or in terms of a marriage etc, I mean quite literally living your life with that person in it, no more than that.

The longer you become friends with someone the more you live through together, the more you have to recall.  You eventually get to a point where you completely forget things you both lived through even though you were there for it, or things which they said, or did, which they told you everything about at the time.  I am 30 years old, if you were my friend that amount of time that's 30 years worth of life to recall and even I don't recall everything I did or said now.  I have spoken about this before, with age memories fade, things we never thought we would forget disappear from our minds.  I can picture perfectly the classroom I sat in when I was 11 in my final year of primary school and I know where I sat, I can see every seat in that class and I know people sat in each seat, but many of those seats are now empty in my mind.  I have forgotten who sat there, their name, their face, everything about them.  I have forgotten entire people.  They are all people who I never spoke to again after we left that school we went our separate ways and never saw each other again.

The human mind only holds onto the things it thinks are important - even when we can't fathom why it thinks those things are important at all and why it forgot things we evidently think were much more important.  Regardless, life is long, and it is filled with moments and details that it becomes impractical and almost impossible for us to recapture and recount.  Be careful what you hold onto and what you fixate on, because you are likely to forget things that were far less destructive to you as a person with ease, if you let go of the things you don't want to carry with you, sooner or later you'll forget them too.