"Returning to writing after a long hiatus is a peculiar experience. It does not feel like starting over, but like meeting an old friend under new conditions. After three years without publishing in my Psychology Today column, I return today to "The Memory Factory" with the sense of reopening a space that was never abandoned-only quiet, like memories we do not revisit often but that continue to shape us."
"A long pause acts as cognitive oxygenation. Freed from the demands of constant production, ideas loosen their rigid forms. Memory, far from being idle, continues to operate in the background: reorganizing experiences, reshaping meanings, forging unexpected connections. What once seemed settled may return transformed; what felt forgotten may reappear with new relevance. The pause does not stop thinking. It changes how thinking unfolds."
"Psychologically, there is something profoundly creative about absence. Imagination needs empty spaces to operate. Continuous output can lead to repetition of concepts, arguments, and even metaphors. Distance introduces a productive estrangement: on returning, we encounter our own ideas as if they partly belonged to someone else. This distance allows memory and imagination to enter into dialogue, not to reproduce the past, but to reconfigure it."
Returning after a long hiatus feels like meeting an old friend under new conditions, reopening a quietly sustained space of memory. The practice develops attention, selection, organization, and meaning-making by transforming lived experience into narrative form. Regular engagement sharpens these capacities, but pauses act as cognitive oxygenation: ideas loosen, memories reorganize, and unexpected connections form. Distance reduces repetition, enables productive estrangement, and allows memory and imagination to dialogue and reconfigure the past. Memory thrives on rhythm and absence, rather than relentless production.
Read at Psychology Today
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