My wife & I have been watching the TV series: "Downton Abbey" on public television in the U.S.A. over the past 2 seasons. This year's segment just ended a few weeks ago. This season there was 1 scene in the show where the head butler, "Mr. Carson", spoke what for me personally was a very important philosophical statement that bears on coping with emotions. (I think that, except in my own mind, it went largely unnoticed.) I probably don't have the wording exactly correct. I didn't write it down at the time. But, in essence what he said was: "The business of life involves making memories. And, in the end, memories are all we have."

We hear allot, nowadays, about how the past is gone & so we should focus on the present. The present moment is all we have. Of course, from a time perspective, this is certainly true. But, for me, this minimizes the power of memories in our lives. Much in emotion centers around memories... both short & long term. We feel sad or depressed about something that happened yesterday, or during our childhood, etc. And, if what happened was significant, then the emotions attached to it can be powerful indeed!

I think that what is significant with regard to Mr. Carson's statement, is it reminds us that the things we do today, how we handle what comes our way today, will constitute the memories which will drive our emotions in the future. So what I take from this is that as we go about our daily lives, & encounter challenges & decisions that must be made, one thing we ought to take into consideration is: how will we feel about what we're doing, the decisions we're making, when we look back on this period of time 5, 10, or 20 years hence? Because, in the end, memories are all we have.

P.S. In thinking more about this, I wanted to add one additional comment. In terms of coping with current emotions, related to things that happened either recently or in the past, I think what Mr. Carson's statement suggests is that learning to do things in such a way that they will produce positive memories is a skill. As such perhaps we can forgive ourselves, or simply achieve acceptance of the fact that, in the past we lacked the skill sets needed to produce positive memories. But now we are learning.