Today, I’m grateful for memory.
As fallible, flawed, selective, malleable, imprecise, biased as memory is, it’s invaluable! Memory helps me get to work every morning without consulting a map and helps me remember my darling, adorable wife’s darling, adorable name, her darling, adorable birthday, our anniversary, my phone number from a childhood home, directions to friends houses back in Keller, even though some of the roads and neighborhoods are long gone.
Without memory, it’s doubtful I would have the confidence in my cooking ability to sit here, typing away, even with no food prepared and iftar merely an hour and a bit away (at time of writing).
Memory sometimes locks us into things we’d rather not remember, but without memory, it would be blessed hard to remember the good things too, even if we remember bad far more vividly, and with far more regularity than the good, and without memory , we wouldn’t be able to remember Allah and reflect on His blessings.
I’m reminded of a quote from a Martin Luther King sermon:
“Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”
Ameen.
