Journaling, for instance, is that therapeutic release of anger, frustration and depression… put down on paper so that it can escape our mind. The entry is complete, though still in the moment of high emotion, we set the journal goodness-knows-where, so that when we do find it, months, even years later while cleaning our room during a productive “I-love-life” day, our rosy retrospect is slapped in the faced by thorny retroheck, bringing us from our current state of emotion back into the heartache of words relived.
The recorded memory cycle can work both ways, however. On the worst day of your life, you can come across an old home video and be reminded of the happiest moments when a significant other took you in their arms… or your kids are writing on a paper plate holding a pink crayon in with all four fingers wrapped around it….
Call me emotionally unstable, a buzkill, borderline pessimistic and broken, but Isn’t it crazy how happy memories can sometimes enhance our present feelings of loneliness and sadness? These recordings of happy times should remind us that life IS one big cycle; that if in a "down" presently, an "up" will surely come. That is itself the challenge of being optimistic when nothing around us gives us reason to be.
Either way, find something. Find something in your house- a video, an old letter, a saved, undeleted voicemail from someone close to you. Let emotion come, I say. For it will be the consequential feelings of that recalled memory that inspires our next one.
