Random Memories

I have to laugh when random memories pop into my head – without, it seems, any relationship to what I’m doing right now, or reading, or working on. This happens most often with music – a snippet of a long-ago movie soundtrack, or a random 80s song that wanders into my brain (yes, this happened with a Whitney Houston song the other week… I wondered about that one, too).

It makes me wonder what triggers these auditory jumps? I do have a constant internal dialogue going with myself. My brain is hardly ever quiet. Is my brain trying to tell me to stop thinking so hard about whatever I’m pondering? am I trying to distract myself? is there some cue in my thoughts or environment that prompted me to remember the song?

I have no idea. But it makes for an amusing mental soundtrack some days (particularly when I’m in endless meetings).

YouTube and Spotify have made it so easy to revisit the songs of my youth and early adulthood. Just today, I looked up a soundtrack to a movie that I loved in college and watched multiple times with my roommates. Now and Then. About female friendships in the 70s – and then when the girls in the movie grow up. And it had a fabulous soundtrack – seriously, just fabulous.

But roommate #1 owned the soundtrack CD (ha! we’re old…) and I did not. And when we eventually went our separate ways – several years after college, when I left to become a travel nurse – well, obviously she kept the CD. I was never able to find it until this morning – when I discovered that some lovely person on YouTube had uploaded it.

Talk about a fun blast from the past. I plan to blast it this weekend (and probably drive my upstairs neighbor bonkers) and reminisce about the good ol’ days of the mid and late 90s.

I love the opportunity that random memories give me to revisit happy days in the past… which also serves to remind me that a lot of good, and happy days, still happen in the present. Even when the week seems full of endless meetings, and various stressors… the good still happens, the smiles still come.

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