Our memory muscle and the value of a diary

The beautiful Lake District in England

What I remember most from the trip is getting lost on the hike my group had been sent on. The teachers had prepared us with lessons of how to read a compass and to site our way from landmarks, but once we were dropped off and left on our own, we took a wrong turn and, though we kept going, we were definitely lost.

At the time, my family was living in Banbury, England, I was fourteen years old, and the hike took place during a 2-week stay at Kilvrough Manor near Swansea, Wales. Organized by my school, the trip away from home was to teach us about the region we were staying in and to give us exposure to nature and outdoor experiences.

I kept a diary, which I dug out of my ‘memory box’ the other day to see if it might spark my remembrances of this school trip. Reading through the diary (written on loose-leaf hole-punched paper, bound with string between cardboard covers) confirmed for me that memory is fickle: It confuses, forgets and exaggerates —

• Confuses: I had thought the getting-lost hike happened on a second school trip to Patterdale Hall in the Lake District, but I discovered it took place during the earlier one to Wales.
• Forgets: The diary includes a section titled “Characterization of staff at Kilvrough” — three pages of narrative assessment by me of the (surely long-suffering) teachers who managed and supervised the trip. "Mr. S - horrible man. Mr. M - you could really talk to him. Miss J - really great, super, smashing, fantastic." On the Patterdale trip, I boiled the assessment of the adults down to just a list, giving each of them marks out of 10 for “niceness”. I have absolutely no memory of doing this — and how embarrassing it is to see my youthful judgement on the page!
• Exaggerates: I mention nothing about the food on the Wales trip, but the second trip to the Lake District includes just about every menu for every day; very little of the food seems to have met my exacting standards of cuisine. I shudder to think how insufferable I must have been in my expectations.

Kilvrough Manor, Wales

Though the diary is disappointing as a memory jogger of specifics, it is a valuable record of my sense of self as a young teenager and my general attitude towards others. And for that, the diary is important to me.

I learned recently from this article by Lisa Cooper Ellison that memory comes in three varieties: semantic, episodic, and procedural. When we look back over a period of our life to write about it as a memoir of some kind, we want to pull from all three:

• Semantic memory encompasses our general knowledge, including concepts; facts not associated with our life; vocabulary; and important dates; etc.
• Episodic memories include specific events and experiences that make up our life, like our first visit to the mountains or our 21st birthday
• Procedural memory, aka muscle memory, involves the skills we have learned

When telling our life story, we often begin with episodic memories (“Let me tell me you about when I was 14 and got lost on a hike...”). Capturing the experience through words on the page enables us to begin giving shape to a moment (or longer) in our life. Then, as we continue to flesh out our life story, we can dig into our past for semantic or procedural memories that can add depth and breadth to the episode’s outline.

"Bank" before "Tuckshop"
so we would have money
(likely supplied by our parents
and meted out by a staff member)
to buy sweets and sundries.
 

While I am not committed to telling the story of my teenage years, I can see that the pages of my diaries from the Wales and Lake District trips contain the building blocks (refined over time) of my adult character and values — courage, relationships, and a connection to the out of doors. To read the diary today is to chuckle at the arrogance of my younger self (grading the teachers on ‘niceness’!), to remark at the resilience of that same younger self (we got lost more than once on unsupervised hikes), and to be glad for the quality of education I received that took me well beyond books and classrooms to congregate living in beautiful locations with wilderness experiences. Add all this knowledge up, and I have the core ingredients for who I was then and, in all likelihood, why (to some extent, at least) I am the person I am today. 

If you have given up keeping, or have maybe never kept, a log or diary or journal of your life, I wonder if today’s post and my experience re-reading my diary from nigh on 50 years ago (!) might persuade you of the value of the practice. It is never too late to start recording your daily life, and never the wrong day to write a story or two about that life. Your friends, family and descendants will thank you.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo of the Lake District by Ian Cylkowski on Unsplash