Periods of my life I have very vivid memories. My four years at college, I remember things almost month to month, it was such a life-changing and tumultuous time for me.

Then I have a whole stretch of time in my 20's where I hardly have any memories. My life took a nose-dive and I almost completely shut down and stayed that way for quite a number of years. A few bright spots stand out -- a couple of memorable vacations and some other events -- but otherwise not much else. It was a scary time in my life.

I think the opening quote is accurate. For both pleasant & unpleasant memories.

My favorite? After 2+ years in Germany with the military my first stateside assignment was Cape Cod. Got there in the summer of 1969. The first time on my own in the U.S. Lots of young college students on summer break and many other tourist. The beach, the small villages, and the great summer night life. Growing up in southern rural Ohio we did a lot of hiking. We didn't call it hiking. It was just going someplace .I took up backpacking in New Hampshire and Maine. A thing I did for the next 40 years.
A song from that year always makes me stop for a moment. Ahhh yes the summer of 1969.

This is lovely !

Holding each of my newborns, snuggled into me, as they calmed down ready for mum to be sorted out post birth and they get their first skin-to-skin feed.

Off my chops, dripping sweat, rabidly howling at the mutating mosh-beast made of hair, limbs and gurning faces while the band pounded behind me, the music an undeniable, almost unendurable physical force. I vomit myself into them, and the mosh-beast roars back it's approval from a hundred drunken throats.

Cupping my hands around a juvenile weedy sea dragon diving at Point Perpendicular.

The moment when, looking out from a hill in northern New South Wales, the background reading and my own mapping come together and I can mentally roll back the entire vista through 300 million years of geological history.

Many beautiful nights with ladies more beautiful than I can possibly deserve to be in bed with.

Fuck, I'm a really lucky dude.

There are times that I wonder if there are too many memories. Too many small moments that were worth more than words. Moments that I shared with myself. None of them compare except for that moment of 'Wow!'

I remember the few magic moments when my luck n skill both held out for a perfect collusion; the few times I did something spectacular in sports despite not being the most athletic, resourcefulness got me out of a situation, or I surprised others with wit. And then I have a lot of obtrusive memories of every cringe moment in life that tend to pop into my head with a lot less effort than the highlights.

The other thing that strikes me about memory is how unreliable it is. First hand eyewitness testimony is among the least reliable forms of evidence possible. In a stressful or traumatic moment we tend to get tunnel vision, miss a lot of things. Our memory readily fills in gaps in our knowledge with assumptions and hallucinations without us knowing we’re lying to ourselves. And the memory deteriorates because every time we recall something, we’re more remembering the last time we heard ourselves tell the narrative than thinking of the original memory. Our memory refreshes and overwrites itself with the most recent version of the story. It’s a subtle game of telephone with your own subconscious.

In the case of small phrases and strikingly wonderful moments like yours it’s pretty likely that you remember things mostly as they were, but in the case of stress or complex situations it seems easy to artificially gild or tarnish our memory as we see fit, or block it out altogether. People who experience a lot of trauma as a child have trouble remembering a year-based timeline of events in their lives because they’ve blocked a lot of it out.

I have so many memories sometimes I need something to spark one. It happens here quite often. If I look at a US map and see the names of cities or towns l have played or visited, l get clear memories of certain things that happened there. Certain songs and smells do the same thing.

Too true - we remember what we can't forget - however much you may wish to push aside some memories.

I can still recall both content and context.. But to what end? Love that little ‘memory rush’ when something sparks a deep one … I’ll go with it as long as possible..

I’ve long wondered if it’s ‘the memory,’ or one's ability and willingness to recall. So many I meet appear to suppress memories, to either avoid pain, or emotions in general. Living once, I go with them

Makes your heart melt...or at least mine.

I have one memory that survives from being a baby in a cot. The smell of my mothers tobacco. There is virtually no alternative to overbred Virginian tobacco today and that stinks by comparison.

Yup don't forget that