Remember or Re-Member?

I started off my morning reading a post by Ruth at Ruthlace. It's about remembering and re-membering and poetry and life and growing old and personal history. Here's an exerpt:

One Sociologist, working with the elderly suggests we hyphenate the word remember to "re-member" to distinguish it from ordinary recollection or reminiscing. Re-membering is more than "Backward, turn back O man in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight." Re-membering is the reconstructing of one’s members, the figures who properly belong to one’s prior selves. Through re-membering, a life is given shape and form and extends back into the past and forward into the future as an edited story. Without re-membering, we lose our history and ourselves.

It's one of those posts that kept my attention and made me think. Go and read it. It is worth the three or four minutes it'll take to read it well - and the time it will take to re-read it, which I know you'll want to do. Ruth writes:

I learned in working with the elderly there is a difference in the mental and emotional health of persons who just recollect or reminiscence about their past and those who re-member.

Perhaps that is the long-term value in some of our blogging. Not the heated political debates or social commentary, but those posts where we think back and write about our lives and the people who have touched us and influenced us. I wish you all a day of re-membering.