Rock on, young savior

There's been psychological evidence to back up the fact that the human brain (probably animal brains, too, if we want to let Darwin out of the basement) tends to overwhelmingly remember only extraordinary events. Mundane, everyday routines tumble through consciousness but don't really stick to anything. If someone asked me what I did the morning of November 11th, 2007, I couldn't give an honest answer if Cathi's life depended on it. I (and you, and everyone else) could only respond with an estimated guess based on what we usually do on weekday autumn mornings. I probably ate cereal. But I can naturally tell you what I did the morning of September 11th, 2001 (or on the personal history end, on May 26th, 2006).

So when we're asked to retrospect, to answer a question like "What in your past led to your interest in snowshoeing?", generally our minds like to leap to the single, unusual, cataclysmic events that most directly and memorably impacted us. i.e. I decided to be a doctor because my dad had open heart surgery when I was seven. I'm deathly afraid of moths because when I was three one flew into my face. I gave up swimming after watching Michael Phelps in the '08 Olympics gave me an inferiority complex.

Despite this selective and somewhat negligent use of memory, it probably gets us in the ballpark of correct most of the time (Super Memorable Events were memorable and super for a reason, after all). But it means that in other areas we neglect to notice how the little, repetitive, consistent, nagging things are shaping us constantly. For the majority of us who don't have too many SMEs to rely on to explain away our current selves and choices, the mundane and the repeated are far more important than the memorable and the singular. Most things hardly matter unless they happen over and over and over, adding up in our habits and psyche, degree by degree, until we're boiled into our current selves like the unfortunate frog in that weirdly tragic fable.

Among infinite other things, I'd guess that I was shaped by being white, having parents who don't put a lot of stock in sports, and the fact that I have a voice that 82% of the population finds extremely difficult to hear.