Memory - the fact that you read that word is already something you retrieve from memory. It's no longer part of the seven objects you can keep floating in your short term processing area at any one time. You're living out of memory. When you get up in the morning and expect the world to work a certain way, that's memory.

Memory is troublesome because it stores the final state of something - its conclusion - instead of the process of reaching that conclusion, including living and learning. For this reason, everything that's in memory is already dead. The only thing that is real is what is ongoing now.

However, "the now," as popularly described, doesn't exist in a vacuum. We must use memory to recall how the situation in its infinite details reached its current calculative state; this is how ideas are tracked and natural laws described. Thus we have to consider that memory is just a means, and the end is life itself: the now and the forevermore, eternally independent of our selves, but full of the same breath of life that makes us what we are, aware right now, reading up until the period.