StoatAubergine

Tag: writing

  • History Invites Analysis; Memory Invites Resistance

    In a few months, our family will change. Twelve years into international teaching, we are no strangers to change. We have changed countries, schools, houses, friendship groups and routines more times than I care to count. Every few years we pack our lives into boxes and begin again somewhere else. Yet this feels different. This summer our eldest leaves for university and, for the first time, one of our children steps fully out into the world without us.

    Like most first-time parents approaching this milestone, I know perfectly well that this is neither unusual nor tragic. Millions of families have done it before and millions will do it after us. He will be fine. We will be fine. There is no shortage of people ready to tell me this, many of whom already own the commemorative t-shirt and hat. Nevertheless, I recently heard somebody make an observation that has stayed with me. I cannot remember whether I overheard it, read it somewhere or simply absorbed it from a conversation, but the essence was this: the way we speak about our parents and our family to new friends is often the way our children will eventually speak about us.

    It is a slightly unsettling thought. Every major parenting decision I have ever made has ultimately been directed towards the same goal: get out there. Become independent. Build a life of your own. Find your place in the world. Yet there is a strange irony in reaching the point where that actually begins to happen. Whether I like it or not, I am about to be reviewed. Family stories that have existed largely within the walls of our own home will begin to travel. New friendships will bring new conversations. Memories will be revisited, retold and perhaps even revised. To be clear, I am not worried about that. In fact, bring it on. But it has made me think about the way families remember themselves and the roles we each play in shaping those memories.

    So here is my conceit: Every family, whether it knows it or not, contains both historians and guardians. The historian is drawn towards unanswered questions. They notice inconsistencies. They wonder why certain stories are told repeatedly while others seem to disappear altogether. They are fascinated by old photographs, forgotten letters, fading recordings and the curious silences that surround particular events. Historians are rarely satisfied with the official version of events because they suspect there is always another layer beneath the surface waiting to be uncovered. Indeed, some of my closest friends are history teachers and, believe me, they are seldom entirely satisfied with the provenance of their sources.

    The guardian serves a different purpose. The guardian protects the family narrative, not necessarily out of dishonesty, but out of loyalty. They understand instinctively that families are held together by shared stories and that those stories perform an important function. They provide continuity. They explain who we are. They connect one generation to the next. Pull too hard at a single thread and the whole fabric can begin to unravel. For the guardian, preserving the story is often just as important as interrogating it.

    Neither role is inherently virtuous and neither role is inherently flawed. The historian risks becoming detached, treating human lives as puzzles to be solved rather than experiences to be understood. The guardian risks mistaking familiarity for truth, defending stories long after their foundations have begun to crack. Yet conflict inevitably arises because each believes they are protecting something valuable. The historian believes they are protecting truth, whilst the guardian believes they are protecting meaning.

    This, I suspect, explains why some of the most intense disagreements within families are not actually about the past itself but about who gets to interpret it. One person asks what appears to be a straightforward question: “But is that what really happened?” Another hears something entirely different: “The story you have lived with for years is about to be challenged.” One person believes they are conducting an investigation. The other believes they are defending a home. Both leave the conversation frustrated because they imagine they are arguing about evidence when, in reality, they are arguing about purpose.

    The older I get, the more I think this distinction matters. History invites analysis. It welcomes scrutiny. Historians expect questions because questions are the mechanism through which understanding deepens. Memory behaves differently. Memory often invites resistance because memory is rarely just a collection of facts. It is entwined with identity. When we challenge a family memory, we are not simply reassessing an event from the past. We are potentially altering part of the framework through which somebody understands themselves.

    Perhaps maturity lies in recognising that families need both historians and guardians. Without the guardians we lose the stories that bind us together and give shape to our shared identity. Without the historians we lose the ability to examine ourselves honestly and to understand how those stories came to be in the first place. The healthiest families are not those with perfect memories, but those with enough confidence in their love to allow those memories to be examined without feeling threatened by the outcome.

    After all, if a story can survive only by avoiding questions, it may never have been as strong as we imagined. The families that endure are those willing to discover that truth and belonging are not opposing forces. The story may change. The meaning may deepen. Some cherished assumptions may fall away altogether. Yet what remains, if we are fortunate, is something more substantial than memory alone. What remains is understanding.

  • When the Past Starts Calling Back

    When the Past Starts Calling Back

    Every so often, the past gives us a little nudge (or a clout). Sometimes it’s gentle…a transportive song (for me it was The Killers ‘All These Things That I Have Done), the smell of a new shower gel that was just like the one Body Shop used to make in the nineties or a Facebook memory that says, “On this day, fifteen years ago…” and shows you in a shirt you no longer own; a defined cheekbone…

    Other times it’s more insistent: news from old friends, a job you almost took reappearing, or the uncanny feeling that your life has circled back to a familiar place, only this time the furniture has moved.

    Our relationship with the past can be a complicated one. It’s not something we have so much as something we negotiate. Like any relationship, it can turn unhealthy if one side starts doing all the talking. There are times when nostalgia can become clingy – whispering that things were simpler, that you were better, happier, more certain. And there are other times when we treat the past like an estranged relative we’d rather not acknowledge: locked in a box marked “lessons learned,” kept safely out of sight.

    Neither approach works for long. The past, inconveniently, refuses to stay where we put it.

    This week, I heard that one of my old haunts had closed, permanently. A small bar where I used to work and socialise over twenty years ago. Back then it was the best of times: cheap beer (if you knew where to stand), loud music, and the easy companionship of people who had no idea where life might take them. It was the kind of place where ideas seemed bigger after midnight, where someone always had a theory about politics or God (normally me) or the perfect sandwich, and everyone else nodded like converts. I thought of Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, describing those drunken nights when the broke and the brilliant crowded into smoke-filled rooms, “putting the world to rights” with the unearned confidence of youth. They were penniless philosophers, dreamers in aprons, declaring revolutions between refills. For a few hours, everyone was sure of everything. Then morning came, and certainty drained away with the dregs of the bottle.

    That’s what I remember most about those bar years: the illusion of endless time, and how intoxicating that was. You didn’t realise that the people sitting beside you — full of opinions, laughter, and half-plans — were already dissolving into memory.

    The truth is, the past has a way of colouring how we see the present.
    If you leave it unchecked, it can start editing the story for you — turning every current challenge into a rerun of an old disappointment, or every opportunity into something that slipped through your fingers once before. But when you stay in conversation with it, not silencing it, not submitting to it: you start to see the past as a teacher, not a tyrant.

    I once read somewhere, no idea where, but it was a philosopher reminding us that memory is not a library but a garden. You don’t just store things there; you cultivate, prune, replant. You decide what grows and what quietly composts into something useful. I’ve come to think that’s the healthiest way to manage our relationship with the past: treat it as something alive, something that needs tending.

    When I look back at my own past — the countries, the schools, the people — I can see how each version of myself still lives somewhere inside me, occasionally shouting advice I didn’t ask for. The younger one says, “Be bold, take the risk.” The tired one says, “Be sensible, you’ve learned this lesson before.” And the present self stands in the middle, trying to referee the debate.

    Maybe that’s the work of adulthood: learning to let the past speak without letting it drive. To take its wisdom without accepting its fear. To love who we were without wanting to move back in with them.

    On a cellular level, we are literally not the same person we were back then. What gives us our identity, even our personage, are our memories. The philosopher John Locke argued that personal identity is founded on consciousness, not on the substance of the soul or body. What makes a person the same person over time, he said, is the memory of past experiences.

    So, we’re stuck with it. Our past is the necessary scaffolding of our identity, the backstory of every decision. But like any relationship, it needs boundaries. We can listen, but we don’t have to obey. We can remember, but we don’t have to recreate.

    The past, at its best, is a mentor who steps aside once the student can stand alone.
    At its worst, it’s a ghost who keeps rearranging the furniture.

    The trick, I think, is to keep it close enough to converse with, but far enough to keep perspective. To let it remind you where you came from but not dictate where you go next. And to plan for the future – to see opportunities not turned pale by thought of past failures, but instead grasped by the ‘new’ you.