memory and me
Oliver Sacks, a great neurologist who I respect a great deal, wrote some very powerful essays on memory that I really resonate with. He writes on memory not as some set of facts that we can retell in an immutable way, but instead, memory as a recreation of a narrative through senses. We 'create' the story of what is happening around us by weaving our senses together. We choose what to focus on, which is also heavily impacted by mood. Mood dictates how we parse our senses and what we focus on when we are absorbing our environment, I believe that memory is the synthesis of this into a narrative. This recollection of our senses is also subject to selective forgetting in order to better serve our personal narrative.
For example, people often return to memories of their past and say that an event must have happened as the basis of some personal growth they may have had. Another example could be a reinterpretation of the senses given some new 'knowledge' we acquire, or a shift in the narrative we may have. We each have a narrative that fuels us, that tells us our life has some meaning and we are here for some reason.
This is an evolutionary trait on the part of humanity, as humans are community based animals. We need one another to survive, and in order to coexist and help one another, we need a shared narrative of our purpose and that dictates how we interact with one another. We exist in a shared narrative, whether that narrative is the American myth of democracy and equality, or something more local and community oriented.
In this way, I express my ideas with the symbols that I was raised with. These symbols could be something as apparent as language (as the words I have to express myself could subconsciously filter the ranges of possibility that makes itself obvious), and something as obscure as the stories I was told in childhood. The culture and narratives that I was raised with strongly impacts what physical senses I pay attention to and how I focus the world around me. Therefore, culture influences how likely I am to believe that 'the reward is the journey itself.' A culture which has seen a great deal of good (or innocent) people suffering is less likely to believe in rewards for 'good behavior,' and less likely to believe in any response at all from the world.