Today's moments are tomorrow's memories

Earlier as a young man I used to drive pretty fast. One day, I was with my mother, and suddenly I took a sharp cut at high speed. The car lost control, almost overturned, and hit the pavement on the other side of the road. It was a new car my father bought from his hard-earned money on instalments. That is one of the stupidest and immature mistakes I have ever made. Leaving aside the financial damage, it would have cost us our lives or someone else would have suffered. Since that day, never have I taken a turn without being careful.

If I erase that terrible memory, I am surely going to face an accident sooner or later and who knows this time I won't be lucky. The point to narrate this incident is that bad memories are the most important lessons of our life. You lost something to gain something really important, which will help you throughout life. Losing such memories would mean you lose those valuable lessons.

I’ve experienced the worst defeats: heartbreak, firings, and terribly embarrassing moments. Things I genuinely thought I’d never get over, that I would never love again, that I could never succeed or be happy. But sure enough time marched on. I kept plugging away at life. The sting of those memories faded. And here I am. I am happy. I am healthy. Just focus on moving forward and let time heal you. Time heals most wounds.

I remembered this book as a beautiful symbiotic relationship between a human and a tree. The tree gave fruit, branches to swing on, and shade to an adorable little boy. The boy grew to be a man who took extra branches from the tree and planted its seeds all around, creating a huge happy grove of generous loving apple trees. He returned years later to find the newly grown trees with his children and his children choose their own trees that they loved and loved them back, and they too planted their trees seeds. This was one of the beautiful memories from my childhood, reading this sweet book, and learning about being thankful and appreciative and how later it pays off for generations and generations!

So, I was going through a rough patch and decided to reread the book. Then the truth all came crashing down, my memory of what really happened restored. I was so horrified by the book as a child that I actually rejected it, and imagined what it should have been. I was in love with a fantasy of what the book should have been.

The book is actually about a young psycho who takes from the tree, and the tree gives willingly, but he takes and takes until the tree is dead, the tree doesn’t even complain, just gives, then he sits on the trees (my visualization) bloody stump when he’s old and ready to die. He made sure the tree went before him. He didn’t plant her seeds. He didn’t take her extra branches. He murdered her, and she gave willingly, and then in his supreme indifference and cold-hearted superiority, he used her stump to rest his tired behind.

There was no orchard, or children returning to have the same experience of sunlight, apples, swings and loving trees. If he had kids, they were probably like, thanks dad, bye, go die on your own, which is probably how he raised them. It's funny/sad to me now but back then when the memories flooded back I actually cried, it was so shocking and devastating. I really misremembered a book completely. Cheers!