When I was younger, I didn’t study the way others did.
In classrooms, understanding seemed to arrive whole. I didn’t memorize facts as much as I recognized when something had landed. There was usually a moment—often marked by a question I asked just beyond the lesson itself—when I knew I was oriented. The subject made sense.
Later, when exams came, I didn’t search for answers.
I returned to those moments.
At the time, I thought this was just how learning worked for me.
Only much later did I realize what I was actually practicing.
I was present when understanding arrived.
Memory, in those moments, didn’t feel like storage. It felt like access. The knowledge was available because the moment itself had been fully inhabited.
I didn’t think much about this until I found myself working in memory care.
Here, I’m surrounded by people who no longer remember their past in ways we usually mean when we talk about memory. Names fall away. Timelines loosen. Histories become difficult to retrieve.
And yet, something unmistakable remains.
They recognize the staff.
They know the routines.
They respond to familiar voices, gestures, rhythms of the day.
They remember now.
Not always in words.
Not always consistently.
But reliably enough to function, to relate, to feel safe—or unsettled.
It’s made me wonder whether memory is less about holding the past and more about staying oriented to a reality that is still accessible.
The same people who cannot recall where they came from often know exactly who is present with them. They sense kindness and impatience.
They recognize continuity.
They respond to care that is consistent.
It doesn’t feel like memory is gone.
It feels like it has reorganized itself around presence.
Almost as if they are no longer inhabiting the same reality I am—
but they are fully inhabiting theirs.
I don’t know what’s happening neurologically. I’m not trying to explain it.
I’m only naming what I see through my eyes.
When presence is steady, recognition holds.
When routines are honored, orientation remains.
When caregivers are familiar, memory works—even without the past.
This has brought me back to those early moments of learning.
In both places—the classroom and memory care—the same pattern appears: when attention is whole, memory doesn’t need to be forced. It becomes functional. Accessible. Alive.
In one case, it carried understanding forward.
In the other, it anchors someone in the present.
What changes isn’t the importance of memory,
but its relationship to time.
Which leaves me wondering whether memory has always been less about recall and more about coherence—about being oriented enough to what is real that something can remain available.
Maybe what we call forgetting isn’t always loss.
Maybe sometimes it’s a shift in where presence is able to land.
And maybe what I was practicing as a child—without knowing it—was the same thing I’m witnessing now:
That memory works best
not when we try to hold onto it,
but when we are fully there
for whatever reality we are still able to inhabit.
And somehow,
that’s enough.