There is a classic line in "East Evil and West Poison":
The biggest trouble for people is that the memory is too good, if everything can be forgotten, every day in the future will be a new beginning, then you say how happy it is.
When I was young, I regarded this sentence as Guigao, and I hated myself very much for having a good memory, and remembering everything bad.
But in middle age, it takes too much to remember to discover.
Because the memory is too poor, what happened last week, this week can not remember.
Because my memory was too poor, when I summed up at the end of the year, I was in a trance, feeling that I had done nothing this year.
Talking about this with friends, everyone agreed that the older they grew up, the faster the days passed, the day after day passed, and what was even more terrifying was that the memory of the past year in their minds was close to blank. Seems to be lonely year after year?
Danish writer Mike Wiggin says in Why I Only Remember You:
"Life is not the years that have passed, but the days we will always remember."
If we have a better memory, can we remember a little more about what happened in the past and create more happy memories for the future?
But what kind of days are worth remembering forever? How do we always remember those days?
In Mike Wiggin's new book, Why I Only Remember You, we may find out.
Mike Wiggin is the CEO of the Danish Happiness Institute and has been hailed by The Times as "the happiest man in the world". His books and research have been featured by more than 500 media outlets, including The New York Times, The Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and the BBC, and have been translated into more than 20 languages and sold 2 million copies worldwide.
Based on the stories of 1,000 people in more than 70 countries, Why I Only Remember You, this book uses unique happiness experiments and psychological research to uncover the secrets behind memory. Not only did it share 22 tips for making readers happy memories, but also took readers to explore how to remember happy moments in ordinary days through conscious planning.
First, use the magic of the "first time"
Many studies have shown that our brains are more likely to remember those new, unusual days. This is also the reason why we remember our first experiences so much, such as first love and first kiss.
Because these novel experiences are processed more deeply by the brain, memories that have been deeply encoded and processed are easy to remember and recall.
Unfortunately, when people reach middle age, many things have been experienced, so the magic of "first time" gradually disappears.
Faced with this dilemma, Mike Wiggin gave two small pieces of advice:
1. Go to a place you've never been to before every year
To create more happy memories, we have to make a little bit of a change in our unchanging lives, and travel is the best way.
Although there are always people on the Internet who joke that travel is just a place where you go from your own dull place to where others are bored, but changing a place will have more memories that are different from before, and these memories can increase our happiness in the future.
2, add a sense of ceremony to life
While travel can add novel experiences, we end up getting back to everyday life.
So it is important that in our daily lives, we must add a sense of ceremony to our lives from time to time, such as buying a bouquet of flowers and making a meal with the whole family, these different actions from usual will make our ordinary lives different.
And it is this point that is different, which will make us always remember this moment and become a happy memory in the future.
Second, use multiple senses to give life a little meaning
Everyone should have similar memories:
I remember the braised pork made by my mother very delicious.
I remember climbing the mountain with my friends.
The song I remember listening to with my sister is unforgettable.
We find that many memories are related to our sensory memories, and we always remember those that are delicious, fun, and good.
Therefore, when we are now in happiness, we must not forget to pay attention to what we see, hear, smell, and feel, and the input of different senses will make our memories more profound.
And as Mike Wiggin says in Why I Only Remember You, "The more you use your senses, such as sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, the more vividly you can remember things, and the more clues you prepare, the more likely you are to remember and recall that memory." ”
Jay Chou has a lyric that vividly interprets this sentence: "The most beautiful thing is not a rainy day, but the eaves with you to avoid the rain."
On a mediocre rainy day, the moment when you hide from the rain under the eaves with your lover, snuggle up with each other and listen to the sound of the rain will remain in your memory forever.
And because there is a memory trigger of rain and eaves, perhaps every rainy day in the future, every time you hide from the rain under the eaves, you will remember the sweet past.
This is how much of a thread you leave behind in your memories, the more detailed and vivid your memories will be.
At this time, if you are dating your lover for the first time, then your memory will have a little more sense of meaning.
We always tend to remember those special days, meaningful moments, especially moments of connection with those around us.
In fact, not only with people, but also with everything around us, the moment we connect with everything around us, we will experience the meaning of our human beings.
The sense of meaning gives ordinary days a little more magic, and it is deeply engraved in our memories ever since.
If your memory is limited, please outsource your memory
Although I feel that mobile phones occupy most of people's attention, it is precisely because of mobile phones and networks that we have left a little trace in the days that have passed quickly.
At the end of the year, when you look over your previous social platform, you will clearly see what you have done, written, read, and listened to every month.
Those few words can easily evoke our memories and take us back to the past year.
This is what Mike Wiking calls "memory outsourcing" in Why I Only Remember You, and if you really can't remember the past, remember to store it.
But there are risks in this way, once the platform goes out of business or other conditions arise, our outsourced memories will be burned, and we will be "digitally amnesiac".
So Mike Wiggin suggested that we open a private social media and list our own photos and ideas into our own memory museum. You can also print out those meaningful photos, keep them forever, and open them all the time, rather than just storing them on your hard disk and never looking at them.
Of course, outsourcing memories can also be done without photos, drawing a picture, writing a song or writing a diary, which can keep our memories.
It's too difficult to write a song, and you can save a BGM that's exclusive to certain moments of your own, using multiple senses to make the memories of the past more profound.
My husband and I were in a hurry to get married, and a lot of preparations were not enough, but I wanted to make a special memory of the wedding, so we chose a piano song "Cannon" that the capital liked very much, as a wedding march.
On the wedding day, after a circle of various vulgar saliva songs, when the bride came on, the Cannon tune came out, I slowly walked to him, we shook hands at that moment, almost broke down in tears, it was this special piano song that made our memories of marriage have an exclusive BGM, and in the days that followed, as soon as we heard the piano song, our thoughts would return to the moment when the wedding I slowly walked towards him.
This is also a form of memory outsourcing, giving our memories something different, so that when we recall the past, it will always be easily recalled.
In the last chapter of the book, Mike Wiggin also shows the reader how to plan a year of happy memories. From January until December, each month I schedule some special activities for myself to make my memories stronger. We can imitate Mike Wiggin to plan a year of happy memories.
We are all ordinary people, those as thrilling as the film and television drama of the miracle life, we are difficult to have, we experience more is three meals a day, two o'clock a line, noisy ordinary days.
Therefore, how to make the plain as water days sparkling is our life problem. This is what Mike Wiggin wants to tell us in Why I Only Remember You:
Time is gone, but time has left us a lot, and it is those bits and pieces left by time that are the nourishment of our lives, so that we can be happier and more indomitable.
If you are as confused as I am and have too bad memories to remember, it is especially recommended to read Mike Wiggin's Why I Only Remember You, and the methods he shares in the book about preserving happy memories are really worth learning and learning.