Friday, April 23, 2010

Memories

Childhood memories. They’re fantastic, right? I mean, I don’t, personally, think about my childhood much until something actually comes up. But really, they’re some of the most precious things in the world, and they should be treasured much more.

Think of your favorite childhood movie. Not memory, movie. Mine, personally, is Aladdin. I LOVE Aladdin. Amazingly so, it’s kindof ridiculous. I don’t think about it very much though- there’s always so many new movies coming out that I don’t even remember Aladdin most of the time. When someone brings it up though, I can immediately bring to mind watching it on VHS with my sisters on the living room floor with a bowl of popcorn; I remember the time my mom said that the Cave of Wonders had indigestion after Abu touched the forbidden treasure. I can still recite most of the lines and sing nearly all the songs in the entire thing, even though I hardly watch it anymore.

It’s amazing to me how clear memories like that can be, how I can remember a single time watching a movie when I was a kid but sometimes not what I had for lunch yesterday. But how often do I actually think about my childhood? Not very.

Memories are kindof fantastic, if you think about it. I mean, not only can we store information that’s happened long in the past, we can file it away and pull it up at any moment (in theory, of course, I realize memory banks are not perfect). I mean, how awesome is that? WAY cooler than, say, a goldfish, which has a memory of approximately 2 seconds, on average, and I’m pretty sure they can’t bring to mind their “childhood” memories.

I tend to think that we, as people, should treasure our memories a bit more. They’re precious- each person’s memories, even ones from the same events, and completely unique. Each person views each and every situation and everyone else in the world subjectively. No two people think exactly the same way, no matter how similar they may seem. So there’s well over 6 billion people in the world, and each person has how many memories? A ton. So out of all the infinite number of memories in the world, the ones you have are completely and utterly unique.

It’s amazing, though, how much we take our memories for granted. It makes me a bit sad, when I think about it. Just being here in Japan makes me realize that, even in another first world country, how different my memories are from people who grew up here in Japan, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

My point here (sorry for the attempt at putting it into words at 1am after a week of approximately 2 hours of sleep per night) being that I think memories are much more important than we give them credit for. I am, from now on, going to make a conscious effort to remember more stuff more often. When I came to Japan was the first time I ever kept a journal for an extended period of time, and it’s really helped- I can recall memories much easier now, at least the ones I have written down. I’m going to try to continue that even after I get back- even if I don’t do anything ostensibly interesting for an entire day, I’m still going to try to write down at least one memory, no matter how small, each day. I challenge you to do the same.

^_^

One more blog from Japan from me. I’ll be back home in the US at the end of May. It’ll be back to normal, whatever that means. So until then… hugs and kisses! おやすみ!

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