The Greatest Moments in Life - An essay on Memory and the Present

What are greatest moments? Are they the best moments in life, the ones we remember or the events we try to forget? When asked, people generally seem to say the moments they consider the best: Weddings, graduations, the birth of children and personal enlightenment. The key word here, it seems, is Greatest, and Great does not necessarily mean best, it means most important. The Greatest moments in life are just as likely to be tragedies as they are triumphs because bad moments are just as likely to influence and impact on us as enjoyable moments. So perhaps when we say what are The Greatest Moments in life, what we really mean is; what pivotal moments in life have the most effect?

J. McTaggart, metaphysicist and Philosopher, once described time as an extremely turbulent Ocean of infinite width and unknown length. The present, he said, is a storm of infinite width and the length of a single moment. As the storm passes across the ocean, it freezes it at that precise instant and it becomes the past.

Those of us with memory can recall the past, and it’s these reflections that we often term the Greatest Moments. People consider memories, and the memories they term Great especially, to be an important part of their identity and character. But although most people agree that they have had greatest moments, what these moments actually are is a highly subjective matter, both for individuals and societies.

The terrorist attacks of September the 11th, 2001, are widely regarded as a tragedy, and a tragedy that was not only tragic in itself, but produced tragic consequences. For America, though not exclusively for America, 9/11 is considered a Great Moment, and it continues to play a part in America’s identity and its actions in the present. It was in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that the Bush administration declared a War on Terror, a war that has resulted and is still resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians and soldiers on both sides. The impact of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terrorism has been felt by societies and by many individuals within those society’s, but does that make it more important than the Greatest moments of another individual. Does that make it important to another individual at all? Would you compare the effect September 11 has on your personality and life to the effect that your children have? Do you think that, hypothetically speaking; the starving family of twelve who struggle through mere existence in rural Tibet consider September 11 important, assuming they’ve ever heard of it?

The Greatest Moments in life are similar only in that they seem to be memories of an event, memories that have a great effect on the person or society concerned, and as such, they are susceptible to the same bias, inaccuracy, and mental editing that affects the rest of our memories. In many ways our memories are more our own construction than any real reflection of reality, and the importance we place on parts of the past is often disproportionate to the actual effect they had. So if we can’t necessarily understand the importance of the moments other people say are the Greatest, how can we be sure that our own Greatest Moments are actually important at all?

Saint Augustine described the present as a knife edge, and argued that neither the past nor the future exist, and are merely a fantasy with the aim of making ourselves feel important. Although you may think that a moment was important to you, and therefore a moment you think of as Great, the only impact it has on your life is the way in which you apply that moment, and the knowledge gained from it, to the present. The present, Saint Augustine and his modern day counterparts say, is the only moment that can be changed and therefore the only moment that we exist in. The past on the other hand only exists as our memories, and even then these memories, and therefore the moments most people deem the Greatest in life, are really our own creation, and therefore the effect they have on our lives is also not as Great as perhaps we think it is. If the Greatest Moments in life are the most important ones, the moments that define us, surely the only Great Moment is the present? These other events, these memories are only a reflection of something that no longer exists, and clouded, subjective reflections at that. The present, on the other hand, is a moment of near infinite possibilities. Now, as you sit here, the Greatest moment of life is being played out. It is the only moment in life you can change, the only instant that is significant and the only thing that exists.

There are many people who would disagree with me on this, people who value their memories and see them, and therefore their greatest moments, as being more important that listening to a speech, washing the dishes or any of the other multitude of menial tasks they perform every day. How can the present be the Greatest moment in life when it’s so frequently occupied by boring or inane tasks and events. How can the Present be so important if we depend on the past to make sense of the world? Well for a start it’s all we’ve really got. The present is not Great because it is important to other people, in fact the Present is just as subjective as the past, the reason the present is so important is really a simple one, it’s the only moment we can experience. So, although you might remember washing up, and how boring it is, the memory itself isn’t an experience, it isn’t a moment of change. To put it another way, we can only remember washing up in the present, and therefore only in the present do we have the opportunity to make a choice, to do the washing up or not to. If we apply the same reasoning to the memories you might consider the Greatest moments, then it’s only in the present we have the opportunity to experience, whether we later consider these experiences major or not.

That’s not to say the past, and our memories, are completely irrelevant. It is, however, a mistake to place a great amount of importance on memories. George Santayana was an American Philosopher who famously said “those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them”, a quote that is often used, reasonably you might think, to contradict the importance of the present over past events. The question is though, where lies the importance of George’s statement? In my opinion, the truth of the statement lies in the importance of applying ourselves to the present, and not to contemplation of past events. It’s only in the present that we have an opportunity to act differently, only in the present do we have the opportunity to learn from past events and although the lesson could be considered useful, it’s the application that contributes to you as a person. Think carefully, because the past might be useful, but only when its applied to the present, only when it contributes towards the greatest moment in life.

Rather than memories of events in the past, the Greatest moment in life is the only moment in life that we can live. The instant that we can control, the most important time and the only moment we can experience is the now, the present and it’s only by realising this and acting accordingly that we can experience the truly great and choose the direction of our lives.