There's cognitive memory and muscle memory. That's well known. I suspect there's also moral memory.
Sometimes, cognitive memory is easy. You have an experience and you later remember it. Sometimes it's hard. I had to work for days to memorize the famous "To be or not to be" passage in Hamlet, and even longer to get the Saint Crispin's Day Speech down perfectly. You should have heard me motivating the troops as I drove to the grocery store, my "band of brothers" ready for anything. I did it over and over and over. And that's the recipe for muscle memory as well. There is a cumulative readiness in the nerves and musculature cultivated by repetition and awaiting the next spark for a nearly automatic flow of your tennis serve or golf swing or guitar chord progression. Moral memory I take to be similar.
It's all about wisdom and that part of wisdom known as virtue, though we can equally well and more traditionally think of wisdom as one of the virtues, even if perhaps wildly the most important one, since it may encompass all the rest, both generally and situationally. Yeah, I know. That won't fit on a bumper sticker or LinkedIn poster or get 2,000 "likes." But it's true. And the implication for us today is that your moral choices, to attend, to focus, to feel or to act, are cumulative as well. The sheer repetition sets up a memory in your soul making you more likely the next time to focus or feel in that way. Because of this, moral goodness gets easier with practice. But so does moral degradation and corruption, as we can see in the news daily. Every choice adds up. There are no exceptions. We’re never just doing, we’re always becoming. Small actions create small habits and they become big and deep traits of character.
With this in mind, take care to build your wisdom in little things, then you'll have it readily and almost automatically available in big things. It's something important to know and to remember.
