I Remember Firelight…

….and you remember smoke

I’ve just discovered a rather quirky and interesting singer-songwriter called Molly Drake. She was the mother of the musician Nick Drake, a reclusive artist in the late sixties/early seventies who suffered from depression (he died from an overdose in 1974, it isn’t known whether accidental or otherwise).

Anyway, listening on Spotify to Molly Drake for the first time, these wonderful lyrics hit my ears:

We tramped the open moorland in the rainy April weather
And came upon the little inn that we had found together
The landlord gave us toast and tea and stopped to share a joke
And I remember firelight…
And you remember smoke

Strange, isn’t it, how we can have exactly the same experience yet have a completely different memory?

It’s all down to how we classify and categorise experiences in our brains. If we have a positive mindset, our brains are programmed to see the best in a situation; conversely a negative mindset will lead us to notice the negative, and not the positive.

Glass half full/glass half empty.

Many people assume that they can’t change. They think that if their brain is primed to look for the negative, then it always…