How to organise your sock drawer: a filing system for the mind

I sometimes look for people in places where I’m not likely to find them. And if that sounds silly, maybe I should explain.

This picture has no relevance to the story. It's just for decoration.

I split up with my partner a few months ago. During the time we were together we went to hundreds if not thousands of places. Sometimes when I pass one of those places, I stop to look if she’s there. I know it’s not likely, but because I’ve seen her there before, I still look. It’s the right place, but at the wrong time.

For example, I regularly go past Leeds Art Gallery. We once met there for lunch in the Tiled Hall Café during my lunch break from work. I remember she sat in Dante’s corner, as she called it, and she was pleased to see me. Well, now every time I go past, I call in and look for her in the same corner. She’s never there, but even though it’s very faint, I can still feel an echo of that past meeting.

At the end of our relationship, in our last few interactions, she was hurt and upset with me. My memories of those last few meetings are painful to recall. But experiencing a brief echo of a past meeting where things were more positive helps to dilute that.

We experience our lives from a linear viewpoint, measured in days and years, and sometimes the ways things end is painful. But once events are in the past, I wonder, does it make any difference what order things happened in?

When events are recent and / or distressing, the memories of those events are like Pringles in a tube where you have to take the top one first, but as you move on, they become more like socks in a drawer, you can pull out whichever pair you want.

My relationship ended with stress and annoyance it also had countless moments that were full of joy and happiness. My hope is that as time moves on, it gets easier to view all those moments as equal, not just giving more weight to the latest, more painful ones. Even when a situation ends badly, that shouldn't diminish the happy moments that also once existed.

Einstein said that ‘the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". One of my favourite passages from any book is from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. It's one of my favourites because I hope it's true.

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever"

I don’t where my past relationship is now. But when I go to the Tiled Hall Cafe and hundreds of other places, I still feel a connection to it, an echo of past happiness. I can't change the past. But I can choose how to remember it. 

I may have to experience the present moment to moment,  stacking those moments one on top of the other like Pringles in a tube, But once those moments are in the past, I can take out whichever ones I most want to look at, no matter what order they were collected in. 

I'm not trying to pretend that difficult things didn't happen. Only that a horrible end doesn't have to ruin everything.

My best days, my good times and all my best moments 'always have existed, always will exist'

When all my socks are clean, and I've got a full drawer to choose from, there are some pairs I like better than others, and it's usually those I go to first. The ones I don't like so much are still in there, but I don't have to wear those if I don't want.