Memories

I have a lot of good memories, but it is the ones out of left field I remember the best.  Like a guy building up the corner of my bed with matchboxes so when I rolled over in the night the bed collapsed.  Or him going to bed not knowing I had put a spanner in his pillowslip.  Hitting the sack was a bit harder than he thought it was going to be.  Or another guy who is one of my best friends, starting his chainsaw in the room of another sleeping friend.  The noise caused his eyes to be like two fried eggs.
Life is full of memories – both good and bad.  It amazes me how the focus of the memory tends to highlight the good.  There are no doubt times I have let another down, or they have suffered in a way where I could do nothing though I wanted to.
It is probably why, when a life has past, the good someone did is highlighted so much.  Sure there are bad things, but lives are celebrated.
There is no doubt in my mind life is full of mundane stuff, and serious stuff.  But what I do not want is for others to need to wrack their brains to remember good stuff about me.  I want to be remembered in a way that no matter if things were mundane, serious, or fun, I was empathetic in a good way.
Memories are just the past in the present.  My memories are made now.  No wonder they say, “there’s no time like the present.”  Really there isn’t.  Making the most of the present is the only way I will have a good future.  No wonder Winston Churchill said, “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future” or Allan Lakein said, “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”
I totally believe that now is what I have.  It is no use crying over spilt milk.  I could have done things differently in the past with a better outcome.  But the past is the past.  Done and dusted.  What I can do something about is now.
C.S. Lewis said something that totally blew me away. “if you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely the ones who thought most about the next.”
Doing the most for me will probably only ever be, saying a kind word, speaking the truth in love, doing my job well, or saying or doing something that will make things better for someone here and now.  As Jim Elliot said, “whatever you do, be all there.”
I like the way a guy called Charles Swindoll put it. “We are missing it if the fun memories are being eclipsed by the fierce ones.  The world outside the family circle is dark enough.  When the light goes out within the circle how great is the darkness.”  
As I often say, I need help.  My first inclination may be to destroy, but I do not want that for me, and I do not want it for anyone else.  I act now, with an eye to the future.