Bridges To Yesterday

Bridges To Yesterday

What a bleak and bitter winter morning.

Once there was a time when I could hear the sound of birds singing and feel the warmth of the sun washing over this room. Today, though, there is only cold and dark and bittersweet memories of days long passed.

For all the pleasure - and pain - they bring, it is too bad that memories aren't more useful; memories can be beautiful or discomforting, full of joy or overwhelming sorrow . They are as fragile as the gossamer wings of an angel and as fleeting as a falling star on a crystalline winter night.

Memories can be as whimsical and as useless as a shadow dancing on a placid, twilight bay but are as essential and as necessary as the air we breathe. Memories are eternal ethereal enigmas - we all have them, we all know there are there, but memories remain as intangible as a distant rainbow.

Memories are the only link we have to what we used to be. Our memories make us who we are. We are, in the final analysis, only the sum total of our memories. Without them we would not be who were are. Memories are bridges to yesterday; they are the only passage back across the river of time.

These fragile wisps, these ephemeral sparkles we call "memories" are never really accurate glimpses of our pasts; they are surrealistic watercolor paintings, rendered beautifully by the talented hand of our subconscious minds. The paintings sometimes look far better than the actual event; for memories, like old paintings, become faded with time. The happiest times seem happier and the saddest times seem even sadder. One thing is for sure -- nothing we remember is ever quite the way it really was.

We cannot measure such ethereal things. We cannot measure the accuracy of our own memories. Indeed, all we know about the event we remember is how we remember them. While I'm sure nothing I remember is the way it really was it is the only bridge I have to yesterday. Memories are all we have; memories are all we are. Without them we have no yesterday, we have no past; and withoutt a past we would have no future - all we would have would be the moment we are in-no bridges to yesterday, no road to tomorrow, we would only exist in the fleeting moments of the present.

Even though memories may be evanescent and even though they offer only carefully crafted versions of our own past - they are the only links we have between what we are and what we used to be - between what we were and what we will be tomorrow.

There will come a time, if we live long enough, when memories will be all we have left when everything else is gone. And sometimes, even those memories are taken away leaving us alone and without a friend. If that happens we won't even have ourselves left. To be old and alone and without a single memory is the saddest place we can ever be.

On this dark and cold winter morning, memories of spring dance through my mind. These memories bring both hope for the spring to come and a yearning for those watercolor springs of my childhood -- of days when I stood among the blooming things, my hands pulling at the strings of kites dancing in the soft blue skies of spring.

I'm not sure exactly how I should feel on this brutal winter morning. I am grateful, though, for the memories that I have. They are the bridges to yesterday.

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