Going through the hundreds of notes on my smartphone, accumulated over the years, sifting through nonsense temporary notes, interesting quotes, reminders, ideas, various passwords, technical notes, serial numbers of products long since discarded, etc.
Yes, I use my smartphone as a memory dump. While discarding away junk and deliberating over whether something is junk, it gets me wondering... What about the memories that we accumulate in our brain? How much of that is junk, that, if we could do a spring-cleaning, we might want to discard? But would it be a good thing in fact to have such powers over our brain? What if, in a fit of over-zealousness, we end up with too few memories?
We think of unwanted memories as baggage. Having no baggage can be liberating. But do we really want that? Perhaps this is some kind of Zen ideal. But it is not for me. I am, like my brain, a bit of a hoarder. So I end up keeping all sorts of notes about things present and things long gone, because, like my memories, they may be nonsense in some larger perspective, but they are a part of who I am.
