Around back-to-school season, I become anxious about where I stand in relation to my aims. After twenty+ years of learning to refocus with the falling leaves, I am hardwired to self-assessment: does my daily life relate to how I want to live?
Over the years, this has lead to various panic attacks and false-starts down new paths, which usually fizzle out of my interest by the holidays. The holidays are just round two of the am-I-failing-at-life anxiety, this time performed in front of friends and family that have witnessed each embarrassing annual routine. Just to quantify what embarrassing means in this case, we're talking about things like transferring between five colleges before finishing my degree; things like pursuing professions such as being a living statue in Istanbul, a journalist on underground performance art and iconography in Belarus, a pediatric palliative care assistant in the EU, and a grassroots fundraising director in San Francisco. In retrospect, it sounds very cool. In real-time, it's a bit disorienting.
After observing multiple post-collegiate attacks among myself and my friends, I began to be superstitious. (This is not a non-sequitur, I swear.) Superstition is a curious term, now taken as an unfounded belief in a lack of natural correlation between events. How did that definition happen out of the etymology to stand above? We can get some traction on superstition with the word ecstasy, meaning to stand outside, the state created through theater which led a person to experience existence from the outside rather than the inside. In the case of my autumnal anxiety, while it wasn't creating out-of-body experiences, it was creating a growing awareness of a time-based system of memory on a scale I had never conceived. My superstition grew that we accumulate memory in relation to time in the same way that we do in relation to space. On the scale of a day, a year, and perhaps longer.
Science conveniently confirmed my superstition by the title of time-based prospective memory, in which remembrance is triggered by a time-related cue to induce an outcome which impacts the future. Superstition confirmed. In addition, time-based prospective memory itself implies a certain capacity to remember beyond the moment and into a potential future. It implies that memory works in relation to outcomes which have not occurred yet. It is itself "standing above/outside" in it's implication of what Plato wrote in the Meno dialogue:
What intrigued me was the possibility that we could intentionally place in time triggers which would remind us of future outcomes we wished to achieve: that it was possible on the scale of one day to set in motion a chain of memory which would accumulate towards specific ends. The implications and possibilities of this are, frankly, astounding, and left me in analysis-paralysis for about a month.The soul, being immortal, has knowledge of all. She has no difficulty in eliciting all her memory, if a man is strenuous and does not faint. Therefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember.
When I came to, it was time to begin. The aim had to be small, practical, and feasible: three ways of thinking that don't come naturally to me. As a lifelong writer and story-shaper, I knew my aim had to be connected to words. As my partner is an illustrator turned graphic designer, he lent his aim connected with images. Together, we would do something each day that set in motion remembrance of who we wished to become and the work we wished to do together. The outcome is so simple it is almost ridiculous to give it the preface of this post, but worthy, I assure you. We do The Daily Draw: one original image and one original poem everyday.
For almost two months now we have sustained this practice, and it in turn has sustained us. We are not yet at the point where this is the majority of what we do, but it is certainly at the center. From today's Daily Draw:
In time lives the memory of all time.
