Drawers of experience, remembered

Looking for clothes for London’s heat wave this week, I opened a drawer I never open, a drawer I wasn’t sure was officially mine rather than Michael’s. In the drawer I found missing summer clothes, my travel hair dryer, and a sudden rush of memories. In February, I had unpacked clothes into that drawer to save putting them away because they were just going to go into the next suitcase. And then there was a virus. There was no next suitcase.

I sifted through the clothes, each item heavy with the memories of the February trip, each one still somehow holding the anticipation of the next trip, the one that never happened. I have been thinking of Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self.” These are two entirely different parts of us, and they have entirely different ways of making judgements about the world we’re living in. The “experiencing self” is the self in the moment. That self feels pain and pleasure. It is bored and delighted. It is the breathing, living, embodied human who is us. The experiencing self is the one that gazes into the delight of the ordinary day with your new baby and thinks, I will never forget this moment, never forget the slant of the sun or the smell of the shampoo or the small noises this perfect creature makes.

Our “remembering self,” on the other hand, is the self that tells stories about our experience. This is the self that processes all of our past moments and projects that past into the future. It is the one that forgets that ordinary, precious day with the newborn. It is the one that warns bleary-eyed new parents that the days of having an infant simply fly by. It is the one that says, “Last time we went to that restaurant, the manager was so rude to us as we left. Let’s go somewhere else.”

That’s because the remembering self is tangled up in cognitive biases. It ignores duration and over-emphasises the beginning, the ending, and the peak of an experience. This means that it will choose a medical procedure that is more painful for a longer time but has a pleasant ending over a procedure that is sharper and faster with a less pleasant ending. It means that we can think, “That dinner was ruined by the way the manager was so rude at the end,” when actually it was only the memory of the dinner that was ruined—the dinner itself unfolded deliciously before that nasty ending. It’s the one that ignores the tiny repetitions of daily life until a forgotten drawer opens or a madeleine is dipped into a cup of lime blossom tea. As Kahneman says, “Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

I have been thinking of how weird this is, here in the messy middle of this Covid time. The same exact feature leads to it feeling so long to our experiencing self and feeling so short to our (future) remembering self. For so many of us, the days drag on, with little novelty to catch our attention, creating difficult times for our experiencing self. Our days blend together, creating few new peaks or troughs for our remembering self to grab on to. This means that this period—no matter how long it stretches out—will be a blink in our memories, even as it feels like forever in our experience.

It would be helpful for these two selves to be able to talk. I mean, they’re both us, right? Kahneman says they can’t. He writes, “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” I wonder, though. I wonder if our experiencing selves could leave messages for our remembering self, like my clothes in the drawer, to help us hold on to what we could be learning here that we will lose otherwise. I wonder how this time of stasis, where new things are quietly growing into the future, could be rich with learning for our remembering self.

In the drawer is the t-shirt I wore on an unexpectedly warm day in Whakatane. I remember it now. There is the dress I wore to Jim’s birthday party where the drought finally broke and the rain came down in sheets. In this Covid time, there are no special clothes to distinguish one day from another in this time. There are no trips, no friend’s parties, no walks down the beach. How will my remembering self ever learn to hold on to the blue of the sky in a quiet London, the silky feel of Aria’s fur after her first hair cut? Will the cessation of the bigger events in our lives leave our remembering self with nothing to grab on to? Or will she get more nuanced with what she remembers, as smaller moments become bigger memories?

I am going to try to build a little bridge between these two selves in this quiet time (recessions are always a good time for infrastructure projects). I’m going to try to record—in photograph, in words—the tiny, mundane moments that are the only shape of my life right now. The squiggling of the worms as I plant flowers in my tiny garden. The sound of Naomi’s laugh that bubbles like a waterfall and fills me with an almost palpable joy. The black and white neighbour’s cat who is right now curled up next to the unplanted hydrangeas in defiance of the puppy who could scramble down the garden stairs at any moment.

Living in complexity, in uncertainty, and in a world that is changing in such odd and confusing ways, requires that we make sense of both our experience and our memory. We need to get better at holding on to the tiny moments of today, out of which tomorrow will bloom. We need to believe less our remembering self and the way she sleeps through important moments like this one. And we need to tuck into the drawers some unmemorable memories that will let us learn from these extraordinary ordinary days.