Gmail Memories

This afternoon, I decided to burrow deep into my gmail folder, as one does once in a few years when one has nothing better to do. I wish I could say it was a walk down memory lane, but mostly it was being annoyed by the amount of junk that I had missed deleting. There were a few memories that I hd consigned to the dustbin. Correspondences with friends I have since lost touch with, email exchanges with prospective employers that I was extremely keen to work with at the time. These were from the phase of great restlessness when I was desperate to leave India at least for a bit. I was bitterly disappointed at the time when none of those opportunities, although in hindsight I am glad they didn't.
All these memories were reminders that it is easy to get caught up in the moment and sweat the small stuff, much of which one won't even remember a few years from now. Isn't that one of the purposes of memories? To serve as reference points for the present, to allow one to view the present from the perspective of the past? I am sucker for nostalgia though, so I would walk down memory lane even if there wasn't any wisdom to be gleaned from it.