We live our lives in the minds of others, in their memories, in their impressions and in their perceptions. Our lives are amalgams of the pieces of us that people have put together, inside their own heads, pieces of us that they have created. They have built their own sense of who we are, in their own sense of reality, a reality just as real as our own, the reality that we feel with our own senses.
Everyone we know has an impression of us, pieced together over time, a collage of our inter-relations with them. People who love us, people who hate us or people who are just casual acquaintances, they all have our lives in their minds and we live in their memories. Lives we may never have lived but are real, made real by the twists and contortions of their consciousness, perhaps more real than our very own flesh and blood existence.
We live in the minds of thousands of people, even if they have only met us briefly, long enough to recall an image or an impression, a sense of us. We live in the minds of people who’ve never met us but have built a picture, a mental image of who we are, what we stand for and what we are capable of. We’ve been recreated, remodelled, reshaped and reformed a hundred thousand times, in dreams and in recollections. We live in false memories, monsters that have done things we have never done, angels that have performed miracles that we have never been capable of, reviled and revered.
We are myths and we are legends. Our lives are fables, anecdotes and homilies, tales to be told and listened to, that build upon our collective story. We are multi-faceted, remembered from every angle, every vantage point, in vision and sound. We’ve visited places we’ve never been to and have been heard to say things that have never passed our lips, all in the memories of others, memories they will swear are true. And who are we to say they are not? Are someone else’s memories any less real than our own? Are we certain that our own memories are not fabrications of what we would have liked to have happened?
We will live on in people’s minds long after we have gone, long after our own ephemeral bodies have ceased to exist, in memories that are recalled by a chance phrase, an event or even a scent, redolent of a past time that may or may not have existed.
We exist in the memories of others more than we can ever exist in our own minds. All the bits and pieces of us when added together are much greater than our own personal entity, the sum of our parts is greater than we can ever be and different to that we will ever believe we are.
We are living in the memories of others. Thanks to Almudena_Grandes
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 