“You have bits and pieces that you remember. And especially on homers, I have flashbacks of certain aspects of it, but there’s a lot of ’em I don’t even remember what happened. It’s kind of crazy. It sucks. I wish I remembered.”
Corey Seager
Deep within a recent article on the baseball-hitting savant Corey Seager, following detail after detail of his many obsessive and relentless habits in the pursuit of a perfect baseball swing, is the quote above about Seager’s memory, or lack thereof. Having been part of multiple World Series-winning teams, having been named the World Series MVP twice, having achieved seemingly everything his obsessions could reasonably be said to be driving toward, he freely admits–and not without a touch of melancholy–that he simply cannot remember.
Memory is famously fickle. There is a bit of Brian Williams in all of us. And that in and of itself is not a moral failing. Whether we fall onto the portion of the spectrum we would characterize as “normal” or the part we would characterize as “dementia,” we are all battling the fickleness of our minds’ treatment of the past.
But it is interesting to me what role obsession plays in all this. I think Seager has inadvertently put his finger on something, which is this: Obsession is the enemy of memory. It will keep you from being fully alive in the present moment. In a baseball career, or as a parent, or in your career, and certainly with your money.
Again, memory is not what we’re after, but sometimes a loss of memory may just be a tip that we are making a trade, and it is always worth asking whether the trade continues to be one you want to make.
Meaningful Returns 