Today my son and I played Super Mario 3 together, and it’s amazing, some of the things that I remember from this game… I must have spent hundreds of hours on this game when I was younger, learning every trick, every secret. No hidden corners of this game were unexplored. And I still remember things. Connor was playing the N-Card, and I told him, “try that one over there… yeah. Now get the one at the bottom.” And I was right. With my guidance, he matched up a mushroom, two flowers, a star, 10 coins, and a 1-up all in a row. But there are also places in the game, where I know there’s something hidden somewhere nearby, but I can’t remember exactly what, and I can’t remember how to get there.

So many things in life are like this. Pathways in our brains that have been formed and reinforced in a way that means they’ll be with us always, long after the details have faded out of our conscious memories. We know there was something about this place… we can’t remember what, but there’s a feeling attached to it, maybe an emotion that we developed as a result of an experience we had once. And I think that even though we can’t remember with crystal clarity, these experiences shape us and change us, and that’s comforting. It means that these things… these memories of things and people I have forgotten, these pieces of my life that were important to me will stay with me always, because they’re a part of me now. They won’t just fade away into nothing.

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