Memories come in different shapes, colors, and intensity. Some are wonderful, some are awful. One of the most pleasurable memories I garnered from decades of international travel was when my host in Tanzania favored me with an exotic hot-air balloon safari over the incomparable African Serengeti.
At 4:00 a.m. I was taken in a Land Rover across the African plains to where our majestic, glowing balloon was coming alive. Super-heated gases were being blasted into the still-limp balloon. The sky was beginning to lighten, and faint colors of orange and pink bounced off the fluffy African clouds.
Once we were settled in the balloon’s wicker basket, and the cotton ropes that tethered us to earth were loosened, we began to slowly ascend above the branches of the acacia trees.
The pilot took us to a height of about two thousand feet. We viewed the vast number of animals on the floor of the Serengeti: herds of wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles; prides of lions returning from their nightly hunting expeditions; cheetahs; hyenas; elephants; and giraffes.
The pilot picked out a herd below and maneuvered the supersilent balloon beneath the treetops, where we could have reached out and touched the animals. Of course, when the pilot decided to ascend, the sharp blast of the gas burner scattered the herd, and we rose once more, high enough to pick another group of animals from the ecosystem to visit. The thrill of our two-hour, early morning balloon ride, as the sun began to bathe the Serengeti and the adrenalin rush from observing so many wild animals close at hand in their morning routines, filled my emotional-memory reservoir to flood stage. I’ll never forget that October morning.
The process of our minds that encodes, stores, and retrieves such Serengeti experiences is called memory. It’s a lot like a cell-phone camera in our hearts that makes special moments last forever. It’s a way of holding on to important things we don’t want to lose.
As Edward de Bono once said, “A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.” Memory also has a way of encoding, storing, and retrieving a bit of heaven from which we cannot be driven, as well as a bit of hell from which we cannot escape. The nondiscriminating memory processes the bad things as well as the good.
Shortly after that delightful trip to Tanzania, I had an absolutely devastating trip to Belgrade, Serbia, in the former Yugoslavia. I was driven to the City of Nis, where thousands of refugees were seeking protection from the Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo massacres. Project C.U.R.E. had agreed to help by donating medical goods to the refugee centers. Nis had set up fifteen refugee locations.
Our first stop was at an old, crumbling hotel in lower downtown.The doctor with us from the ministry of health succinctly warned me, “Most of these people have already died inside in order to survive.” They had walked to Nis trying to escape getting shot in cold blood during the ethnic cleansing.
We started on the top floor of the hotel. A man and his family of eight, including his elderly parents, lived in one small room that had been a closet. They were surviving on macaroni. The man told me that gunmen came to his house one day and ordered him to leave right then with his family, or they would line them all up and shoot them. He was told he could leave his blind father and elderly mother behind, and they would kill them for him because they knew the old couple would slow them down. As the family left, the men ransacked their house for any valuables and then burned the house and outbuildings so the family could never return to Kosovo. As the family walked north, they turned and watched as all their earthly possessions went up in flames.That family was part of approximately eight hundred thousand victims forced to flee Kosovo.
As we stood in the hallway of the fourth floor, we were surrounded by women who looked very old. I was told that some were still in their forties.
One woman from Kosovo had watched as her husband and sons were shot. Then she and her daughters were raped as they fled their home. Through her tears and occasional sobs, she shared with me the memories of the beautiful flowers she had loved at her home in Kosovo.
“They burned everything,” she told me. “I have nothing. Now I write poems, but there is no one left to read them or listen to me.”
On another floor, a younger woman ran to her room and brought back some sort of diploma to show me. The paper was watermarked and stained, and the frame had no glass. Along with the framed document, she held two pieces of broken glass. She stroked the surface of the glass gently as if she were touching the soft skin of a baby’s face.
As she stared at the glass, the pilot light of her memory sputtered in her eyes. “This is all I have left of my life and my family. Now I have nothing, and no one is left. I’m not sure how I came here. I am lost.”
Some memories are wonderful . . . some memories are awful. Sometimes we have a choice about what memories we’ll store . . . and sometimes we don’t. However, I decided while standing in the old Hotel Park in Nis that I would actively choose to gather and store an abundance of good memories in my memory reservoir. I needed enough good memories to far outweigh the possibility of bad memories I might acquire.
I challenge you to intentionally build a beautiful memory today that will keep and sustain you through all of your tomorrows.