I don’t remember any of my Mother’s stories. I do remember her by the bed, leaning over me, singing: 

Tell me a story
Tell me a story
Tell me a story 
And then I’ll go to bed

There are more verses and I remember them as well. But I can’t conjure the image of my Mother telling me the stories.. Perhaps, as she spoke, I took off into whatever world she was describing and only came back to reality at the end, forgetting everything, like a person hypnotized. Perhaps she was so innovative, she told a different story every night, thus confounding my ability to remember anything. Perhaps I always fell right to sleep and there were never any stories. 

I wonder about what we choose to shed from our brain circuitry. Recently, a friend sent a picture of one of our college theater productions from 50 years ago, a play called American Primitive. I immediately remembered the production and the girl in the photo, proudly identifying  her. “But you’re there too!” said my friend. “To the left! Dear Maria!” Sure enough when I looked at the picture, I was to the left of the lead, staring up at her. I remember the play, I don’t remember being in it or the character named Dear Maria. 

I used to joke that perhaps there are periods where I’m being kidnapped by aliens who erase certain memories, but now that aliens are among us, that feels like a cliché. (What? You didn’t know? 😄) There are spiritual traditions that suggest I don’t remember because I wasn’t present, that the moments I’m actually present for in my life are the ones I remember. Yikes. 

Staying present enough to remember life events is challenging enough. But what happens when I lose touch with parts of myself? It’s as if we are designed to forget. The plasticity of our brains is so powerful that our habits invisibly adjust in countless ways to allow us to keep going. The ski injury that caused you to shift slightly more onto your left leg to compensate. The childhood habit of hunching to hide your burgeoning breasts. The clenched shoulders held to look strong. And then the brain “forgets” what else is possible. Thomas Hanna, the creator of Somatics, and who in many ways was responsible for bringing Moshe Feldenkrais into our lives, called this sensory motor amnesia. We literally forget our options. 

What parts have you neglected? What would you like to recall? Who knows, by reclaiming our movement possibilities, we might actually recall other things we’ve forgotten – like where I left my pruners, or the shopping list, or the person’s name that’s stuck on the tip of my tongue. After all, if I move better, I think and feel better. And as we age, memory becomes a precious commodity. Let’s preserve it!