On Memories

There is a certain sense of pointless arrogance in wanting so hard to reject the world based on selective perception, or placing extra focus on one side of the coin rather than considering both sides. Sure, most things to me will never make sense, and I know most days I will continue to feel as though I'm living in a giant circus, but I have to shift my focus away from that. Three years on and torturing myself by focusing exactly on what I know I can't change is now revealing far more about me than anything else in this world.

Why is it always so much easier to focus on other things or people rather than ourselves? There is this... illusion that if only we could make everything right on the outside, somehow it will lead to everything being right on the inside, too. I fell into the trap a long time ago, back in the days when my mother and I lived in precarious conditions. The stark contrast between how things were and how they changed was one thing that messed me up for a long time.

As we struggled, moving from one place to the next, never sure how long the respite would last, I got myself thinking that if only we could have a proper home again it would make it all better and suddenly everything could go back to the way things used to be. Between the age of 17 and 25, that is all I could think of to make myself believe that things would be okay again. I could not accept that what once was had passed - as all things are bound to do. I became a prisoner of my own ghosts. And each passing moment from then on was to add more sorrow inside the giant black hole eating at me from inside. Each memory formed by passing moments became little more than nutrition for the black hole within.

In the greater scheme of things, though, all we really are in the end is memories, and most of our human world as we know it rests on the passing of memories from one generation to the next. Among memories passed on from one generation to the next is knowledge, experiences, sometimes even the inheritance of knowledge as to where we come from. All this serves to preserve a sense of continuity from initial point A to the yet unknown or unfolding point B as I write this. Severe that bridge allowing for the transmission of memories from one person to another along the way and there would be no world to speak of.

All species on Earth seem to follow that need to connect past to present through memories, the only means of connection through ever-flowing Time. Of course, in the case of animals, we would be more likely to be talking about instincts and survival techniques passed on from, say, mother cat to her kittens. But the point is the same: if mother cat didn't teach her kittens and if she didn't pass on her own 'knowledge', the idea of cats as we know it would be disrupted. In fact, it may well mean there would be no cats to speak of for they would lack so much guidance due to the breach in the passing on of knowledge that they could not survive long.

As I pondered all this, I wondered how come memories hurt me so much when really they play a primordial role even just to survive long enough to have a world to speak of. And I realised that it was my attachment to them that led to the pain. This of course led me to start facing the fact that attachment has always been something that held me back even inside my head.

Attachment, fear of loss... it's all the same really. It only serves to stunt growth inside and out.

I used to assume that my past experiences of sudden loss had at once made me immune to it in terms of fearing it. But I was wrong. It was only the premise for a mighty lesson for myself. It was only the equivalent of the first act of a play when the plot is being set up or laid out.