WHAT'S IN YOUR WALLET?
The way we steward our memories can be a major impediment to our developing a great attitude. Past experiences, as well as our perceptions of those experiences, are collected over the years.
These are stored in what I call our internal photo album. Here your memories, like pictures, are catalogued for quick retrieval.
These photo albums similar to the plastic picture holders we keep in our wallets or the albums we keep on the shelves in our family room—you know, the ones filled with pictures of our children, vacations, birthday parties, graduations and the like. The pictures that made it into these hallowed pages of fame represent only a fraction of the pictures actually taken. How did these specific pictures get the honor of holding the family's memories? What qualities earned each snapshot the privilege of being mounted in the family photo album?
Well, it works like this. The family member who is the first to arrive on the scene and thumb through the pictures recently returned from the developer becomes the judge of what pictures will actually make the cut. In our household, that person is usually me. (I plan it that way!)
Now the selection process begins if, as I am thumbing through the 3*5-inch prints, I come across a picture that makes me look heavier than I really am, out it goes! It is usually discarded immediately without hope for a trial. Any photo snapped at the precise moment a forkful of food was entering my mouth is consigned to the dark abyss of my trash can. If there's one that shows me with my eyes closed, looking funny, with bad posture or anything else that might be conceived in the eyes of the beholder as less than optimal, it is whisked away without funeral or fuss.
Only those pictures that cause me to rival the best male models make it into the album! Then when someone pages through one of our commemorative displays, I look like I just stepped off a Hollywood set.
None of us would ever allow all the pictures into our albums. That would be horrible. And neither would we take the poorest of the pictures, place them neatly under each cellophane page and throw away all the best shots! That would be masochistic!
As silly as that sounds, that's often exactly what we do with our memories. We forget the best and remember the worst. We tuck the injuries away in the pages of our mental photo albums, and whenever we get the chance, we thumb through the pain again and again. If you could flip through most people's memory albums, you would probably find few prize pictures and many more painful ones.
