Why We Remember the Storms

When you look back on your life, what do you remember first?

I started thinking about that while writing The Seeker's Lessons. When I went looking for memories, some came easily. Almost too easily. I could remember the room. The sound of a voice. The feeling in my stomach. The way my body reacted before I had words for what was happening.

Other memories were harder to find. Not necessarily because nothing was there, but because nothing was wrong.

That's a strange thing to realize when you're trying to write the story of your life.

There is a line from the book that still haunts me because of how true it is: "I've written mostly of storms. Not because the sun never showed up, but because my nervous system learned to track thunder."

I still feel the effects of that today. I notice the shift in someone's tone. I notice when the energy in a room changes. I notice the subtle things that tell me something isn't quite right, sometimes before I consciously understand what I'm noticing. There are parts of me that still listen for thunder even when the sky is perfectly clear.

There was sun. There was laughter. There were ordinary days. There were people I loved and people who loved me. There were moments when I felt safe. There were birthdays and holidays and inside jokes and stupid things that made me laugh until my stomach hurt. There were probably thousands of completely uneventful Tuesdays when nothing particularly good or bad happened at all.

I just don't remember most of them.

But I remember the storms.

I remember moments when something shifted in a room and I knew it before anyone said a word. I remember watching faces, listening to voices, paying attention to moods. I remember the feeling of waiting for something to happen.

Those memories stuck.

And for a long time, I think I confused what I remembered most easily with what there was the most of. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

That became particularly complicated when I started writing a memoir because when you sit down and ask yourself, What happened? your memory doesn't politely hand you a chronological report. Mine certainly didn't. It handed me moments, and many of the moments it handed me were painful.

There were times when I looked at what I had written and wondered whether I was being fair. Was I making my life sound worse than it actually was? Was I focusing too heavily on the painful things? If someone read these pages, would they assume there had never been anything good?

And then I had to ask myself another question: Who was I trying to be fair to?

That's an uncomfortable question when you've spent a good portion of your life worrying about how your version of events might make other people feel.

Because the good memories don't erase the painful ones. And the painful memories don't mean nothing good ever happened.

A quiet afternoon doesn't necessarily leave the same imprint as fear. An ordinary dinner doesn't demand the same attention as one where you're watching everyone's face to figure out whether something is about to go wrong.

Safety doesn't always announce itself.

Danger does.

Maybe that's why the storms were easier to find. They left landmarks.

That doesn't mean every day was a storm. And I think that distinction matters, especially when we tell stories about our past.

I think we have a tendency to make absolutes out of memory. My childhood was terrible. My marriage was wonderful. That was the happiest time of my life. Those were the worst years.

But a life is rarely one thing.

There can be laughter inside terrible years. There can be loneliness inside years that looked wonderful. Someone can love you and hurt you. You can miss a place you were desperate to leave. You can have beautiful memories of someone who also caused you pain.

Two things can be true at the same time.

Writing The Seeker's Lessons forced me to become more comfortable with that. I didn't need to add sunshine to make the storms more palatable. I also didn't need to pretend the storms swallowed every bit of sunlight that existed around them.

Both belonged to the story.

And maybe that's one of the things I've come to understand about memory. Memory isn't necessarily a highlight reel of what happened most often. Sometimes it's a collection of what demanded our attention.

For some of us, that meant learning to track thunder. We learned the pressure change. The shift in the air. The first distant rumble that told us something might be coming. We became so good at watching the sky that eventually we could detect a storm before anyone else noticed a cloud.

And maybe, years later, when someone asks us about the weather back then, thunder is what we remember.

That doesn't mean we're lying about the rain. It doesn't mean we're denying the sunshine. It means some things left a deeper imprint.

I'm trying to remember that when I look backward now. The storms mattered. They shaped me. Some changed the direction of my life.

But they weren't the whole sky.

So maybe the question isn't only, What do you remember when you look back on your life?

Maybe it's also:

What might have been there all along that your mind simply never needed to remember?

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