The Focusing Illusion

‘Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.’

We have an ‘experiencing self’ who lives in the present moment and a ‘remembering self’ who keeps track of the story of our life. This story is a highly selective and simplified account that leaves out the vast majority of our experience and perhaps the experiencing self takes photographs in an attempt to influence it.

Yet the remembering self must be selective because we simply cannot use all of the information we perceive. Just as making all of the text in this paragraph bold would not help you to remember it, taking photographs of everything we encounter would not help us to remain conscious of it: if everything is important then nothing is.

So what is it about a moment, face or place that causes us to craft it into a time travelling monument which tells the story of life we wish to remember .. someday?