The Relativity of Memory

My favorite memories are the ones that sneak up on you. The ones that bring an unintentional smile to your face and make you long for simpler days. Whether or not the days of those memories were actually simple or not is questionable. Memories are such powerful things. They have the ability to transport you from your current, hum-drum existence into a time that clearly meant enough to you to store away it's ghost within the walls of your mind. But something I always wonder about is, were you to travel back to that moment in time, would it be as grand as you imagine it to be now? If you ask many adults now, they will claim that high school was the greatest time of their lives, and yet ask me or any of my friends who have graduated high school in the last few years and we're very likely to say that high school sucked. What about twenty or thirty years from now? What then? Will we look back on our high school years and think how lucky we were to have so few responsibilities and so much time to be with friends? Will the negative recollections of mean girls and boring lessons fade into oblivion? Will those high school years seem like a time of freedom and promise compared to a current life of job and family obligations? Maybe memories only mean so much to us because they are in the past and because we don't actually see them clearly anymore. Maybe memories are only worth anything when compared to current life. Maybe it's all relative.
Right now might be a good memory of tomorrow or fifty years from now, but why wait that long to enjoy it? Enjoy now, right now!