Now, I’m no scientist. I’ve read some things. They’re dated by now. I recall some things from those readings. What I recall accurately is dated now.

Then there’s all the things I only think I recall. I don’t know that I recall them well unless I check myself, but that’s really just not the way it works, is it? Even if I had the motivation, and I kind of do, who’s got the time for that?  I try my best to do that if I’m stating something as fact, but stating categorically that something is factual is a vice I try not to indulge in. As a virtue, it’s reserved for rationalists attempting to persuade someone with sound arguments and compelling evidence.

But mostly, no, I don’t do that. I’m fairly confident I’m in good company with you, Dear Reader. Oh, we mean well, don’t we, but how often do we really step back and question the depth of our convictions, much less the reasons and evidence by which we’ve been convinced of a thing?

So I try to limit myself to conjecture for the most part. I suppose a great many things. I consider them little one-man thought experiments. If A, what B? How? Why?

When it comes to memory, it’s all conjecture for me. Were I the convicted sort, I might dare suggest Dear Reader try it and spread it to all their acquaintances.

So when I remember something, I’m supposing what I remember actually was, at least in the most important particulars, fairly close to how I recall it. Right now, for instance, I cannot, off the top of my head, tell you what classes I took, in what years, with which professors, using which texts, and the order of the assignments that I completed. But I recall doing those things. The details are lost in background noise. But I know I took some psychology classes. I know memory was discussed. And I know I’ve read a bit more about memory on the side somewhere. And that’s supposing quite a bit to suppose I know these things.

Can I recite titles? No. Sadly, and it’s no boast, just a matter of statistics, I, and probably you, too, have probably forgotten more than most people have ever known. So I’ve forgotten the studies that have nearly convinced me of some things about memory. I recall a sense of the material, and retain an impression that could function as belief if I let it.

I recall that eye-witness testimony is unreliable. Minutes after observing a collision, a group of people who witnessed it will misremember details like the colors of the cars involved. Ear-witness testimony is also rotten. We remember what we experience only through the lens of our own perception of events. We don’t get the details quite right. If the memory is clearly about clothes, maybe the floor matters so little you might remember a red rug and not the blue one that was there. Rather than have these surreal little voids in our recollections, our memory-forming function fills in the gaps for us, usually in some way that is utterly unremarkable.

Here’s a simple test: have you ever misremembered someone’s floor as, oh, covered in tarantulas?

Of course not.

As I think back over five decades of my life, the memories are thin, ephemeral, attenuated. They’re peppered with just enough detail to glue a scene or an impression together. The vividness of a memory doesn’t appear to be contingent on where it fits in the linear flow of time. I have vivid memories from the 1970’s fresher than what I had for breakfast yesterday.

Some are gossamer, memories that barely count as such. Some of those memories make me wonder if I’m even still remembering the remembered event, or if I’m merely remembering remembering it, as though I’m playing a game of telephone with myself over the years. Subconsciously, we might even have a propensity for remembering something repugnant as somehow not as bad as all that. Alternately, we might recall something pleasant, or merely innocuous, as some odious offense.

So when I think back over the years, I’m remembering all kinds of things. All I can really assert with any degree of certainty is that my intention is to recall a true enough version of events as to make no difference.

Thanks to key events at different periods of my life, I have various anchors in my memory. If I shift my attention to those memories, they tend to bring memories of contemporary events into focus as well. I think I’m fortunate to have led a fairly eventful life, because at most only a few years here or a few years there ever pass so tranquilly as to be unremarkable and much like any other year, indistinguishably so. Then again, there are those who lead such lives and find that good fortune for them.

I remember so many things, however incorrectly.

Strung together, those memories create the impression of a narrative, a string of But for This, That Might not Have Beens. It’s enough to give most folks the sense that the events of life have some greater sense, as though there’s some force propelling them along their particular trajectory to some ineluctable conclusion. Fate? God’s will? Maybe they’re not wrong.

Were it not for all the preceding events of my life, I’d not be right here, right now, just so, and neither would you. Whether or not there’s any actual meaning in that series of events, I do not know. The most compelling evidence I’ve ever found to suggest that there is some kind of meaning to it all is entirely subjective. By the time I finish nitpicking at that evidence, my personal experience, or at least my misremembering of that experience, I’ll always be left wondering if I’m not actually the textbook Brain in a Jar. The odds of that being the case in the world as I think I know it are infinitesimally small. But what if the world as it is happens to be one in which Brains in Jars are as common as telephones? How would I know?

That puzzle had me flummoxed for a good long while. I didn’t just have a flirtation with nihilism. It was a steamy affair. So I arbitrarily decided that I was coming at it all wrong. Whether or not what I recall is True with a capital T is utterly beside the point. The big question for me is, “what will I do with it?” Quite a few wise people tell us that there’s no point in fixating on the past because we can’t change it, and we might as well not fret about the future, because it’s out of our hands, so live in the here and now. I don’t think they’re mistaken.

But I think there’s utility in looking at the apparent narrative of one’s life. Are there recurring themes? And are you basically content with your current lot? If so, you’re looking at the recipe for your own success. Circumstances such as they were coupled with you as you were coming to be at those times, resulted in the decisions and reactions that propelled you to the next event, and the next, and so on. Our experiences lead to our decisions, which lead to more experiences until we become the kind of person that makes those kinds of decisions, for good or ill.

Making decisions of a certain quality about certain things increases the probability of other events occurring.  A person who never buys lottery tickets stands a much lower chance of winning the jackpot than someone who does buy them. Considering how bad those odds are to begin with, the non-buyer really only stands a chance if someone gives them a ticket or they happen upon one. People who rob liquor stores stand a far greater chance of living their lives in prison than someone who walks the straight and narrow.

For better or worse, over these last five decades, I’ve become the kind of person that makes the kinds of decisions I make. But here’s the thing. I can speculate about some desirable outcomes. To increase the odds of those outcomes occurring, I need to make the kinds of decisions that increase those odds. I need to become the kind of person that makes those kinds of decisions.

Maybe that involves a degree of change. Maybe it involves decidedly uncomfortable changes. That kind of determined change takes motivation. When the narrative one lives can be described as undesirable to oneself, that motivation might be lacking. If the narrative is traumatic enough, it could be that the motivation itself might be impossible. Anxiety and depression, the hallmarks of our age, can be debilitating.

I wrestle with my own demons in my own fashion, and more than a few times they’ve brought me to the verge of despair. Somehow, not always with intention, and certainly not always by design, I keep managing to clamber out of that pit. I’ve clambered out of it enough times, for that matter, that the experience has given me hope, irony of ironies.

I misremember all these misadventures, naturally. And I think I know there’s no firm basis for believing that there’s any meaning to the sequence of events I think of as my life. But when I look back over the arc of years, I not only see it receding into a not-so-very distant past, but I see, almost like roots, the connections of that sequence of events to all other events, from the most contemporary to the astronomically distant. I remind myself to skip the grander teleological explanations for how I got here. I remind myself that the only thing especially significant for the wee patch of time I recall is that I happened to be here for it.

I happen to be here now, for that matter, and unless something changes drastically, I’ll be here tomorrow and the next day, too. I can think of plenty of things that increase the odds of my premature departure from this sequence of events. I prefer to think that whatever is not impossible is merely improbable. I tend to think that whatever is improbable can have its odds improved. And the events of my life have led me to think that a great deal more is plausible than I can even yet imagine.

I can imagine some things.

For the moment, I imagine that finding some over-arching theme to the narrative that conforms so closely to the events of my life might have some utility. Perhaps it will suggest something plausible which I have not yet considered. Perhaps that plausible end is desirable. Perhaps the odds of that desirable, plausible end can be improved. Perhaps my own decisions help improve those odds.

I imagine some grand, and grandiose, things. This is going to require an epic narrative, which would be cause for alarm if I didn’t think that perhaps I’m still in that Humble Beginnings part of the story arc. No, the tale must be epic for its protagonist to become the kind of person that makes the kinds of decisions it takes to improve the odds of the utterly unlikely so much that the wildest fancies become attainable.

I just hope I misremember this epic tale well enough for it to work.