yellowing pages

One week into a new city and a new job and you can be excused for feeling a little rudderless. ACJ already seems a distant memory although it has been less than a month since I graduated. And then there are even more distant memories- engineering college and junior college. Further back is school.So how does one continuously reorient oneself in the face of constantly changing circumstances? Is there anything to be gained from pondering over the change in one’s circumstances?
Technology today allows one to visit all these people and memories simultaneously. One is bombarded by recollections from different periods of one’s life. Looking back feels like sifting through an old dusty book in which every chapter is unlike the others. There are sad chapters interspersed with happy chapters and turning the leaf on a happy chapter is always painful. And one is always left wondering whether the last chapter will be the happiest in the book.
A recent happy chapter is visited again and again. Technology allows us to visit not-so-recent chapters frequently as the people who inhabit those pages are just an index finger-press away. But as the pages keep adding to the book revisiting long past chapters becomes more and more laborious. We bookmark some pages and people for quick reference and leave the others to yellow away peacefully. Technology has, in some senses, made human memory irrelevant. There are enough visual, audio aids to aid memory that it seems like one need not remember anything at all. One need just store in a flash drive or as a digital photo. Technology allows us to freeze moments of time for posterity. But, for all its glories, it cannot arrest the motion of relationships. It can freeze memories of a relationship but not the relationship itself. It can remind us of what certain people meant to us but cannot influence what they mean to us now. Relationships are fluid and certain people become less dear to us as time goes by. And it is this I fear. That I can’t freeze all the relationships from a recent happy period of my life. I must watch as people drift away from me, as they become less dear to me and me to them. I’m not worried about the bookmarks, or the main actors in my story. I am worried about the supporting actors who go a long way in defining a period of one’s life. I might think of them and imagine what their life is like right now. But, they will yellow away and every time I revisit them I will realize that they mean less and less to me. At such meetings pleasantries will be exchanged and good memories invoked. But conversation will dry up eventually, soon enough. And there is nothing I can do about it.