I happened to open an old e-mail when I tried to find the address of an acquaintance of mine. I read on.

It's a story of my laptop computer being stolen during my overseas training in Montreal. This is a hard story to swallow, and I skipped meals for two days, as what people do after having a heart attack. Two days isn't a long time, but it was long enough to see me rewrite a manuscript (over four thousand words without a backup copy), to lose my wit, to leave a vacuum where I tried to fill with buying a book When Men Grieve .

It came as no surprise, after nine years, to see that I forgot most of the details. Memory is not, as many of us think, an accurate transcription of past events. Rather it is a story we tell ourselves about the past, inundated with lessons that we learn, or lessons we wish we should have learnt. To that matter, what am I supposed to remember? I found a quote in my e-mail, "Clenching the sands of life too tightly only causes more of it to slip through our fingers."

Thoughtful remark, I would say.