There’s an abundance of technologies that help us remember—mobile notifications, photographs, beadwork, days of observance, repetition, writing. Such prostheses are our coping mechanisms for the information age.
As a result, the choreography of remembrance becomes overly complicated by our lack of trust in it. We must not only recall the content itself but also the practice of giving it material form, the location of said material, the maintenance of said material.
Yet we understand that materials can be just as ephemeral as thoughts. The passage of time and the entropy of the elements spare no memento. The electronics we treat as bodily extensions were designed for obsolescence, and the software we deem our “second brain” lasts only as long as the next economic downturn. Meanwhile the files of yore are already yellowing, rusting, and inaccessible via USB-C.
Perhaps it is best to practice non-attachment with both our memories and these physical reminders. Perhaps when we forfeit these traces to the erosion of time, whatever information is left will be precisely what we were meant to remember.