Instrument of Memories

Youth is real. 

Youth is a fairy tale.

Youth is the freshman year of adulthood.

Our society idolizes youth. 

We block out the bad and the uncomfortable memories, memories that bring back a memory of a broken heart, the vulnerable moments we wanted to forget and never recall again.

But as the years pass, these are the memories we no longer fear. We are not embarrassed by painful rejections nor do we blame ourselves for the things over which we had no control. We are not different people, we're just more comfortable in our skin and perhaps enriched with cool confidence.

But youth is and always will be a pink cloud floating in and out of our existence. Sometimes we linger for too long in its midst, idealizing the moments when we felt on top of the world. This journey to the past is usually followed by nostalgic melancholy of "where has time gone".

The few who had the foresight of keeping a diary or a journal of our years of youthful endeavors are in luck. They can ride the roller coaster ride of their youth and recall memories otherwise forgotten. The rest of us dwell on the big moments, grand emotions and the heartache. It is an unfortunate truth that without written recollection or memories documented in photographs, the past really is the past, a forgotten past.

But the brain has a way of recalling forgotten memories from the depths of a long-forgotten storage space where old data is kept. With our senses alone, we recall faces and places and hey even daisies.

For me, my sense of smell often triggers a flash from my traveling past to countries and cities. The rich scent of sweet but piquant spices lures me back to the Grand Bazaar of Damascus where I walked alone at the age of 21, tasting tea in every shop I entered, and feeling happy and curious in the company of kind and the most jovial people I've ever met from whom I learnt hospitality. 

From the song of crickets, I am returned to my 120 nights of sleeping in the open air in the Wadi Rum desert, camping off the red and dusty East African rural roads, and quiet sleeps in the thick bushland of conservation parks. In recent years, their song brings me back to the beautiful outskirts of Durban, the most colorful city in the world. 

But it's the soundtrack of my life that bring me back to my fun pub days. Certain rock anthems remind me of the actual Fun Pub on the Greek Cyclades island of Ios, while World, Hold On and Jack Johnson 's Better Together reminds me of sweet moments with dear friends on that very same island. 

David Gray's This Year's Love and The Other Side take me straight back to London in the early to mid 2000s. 

Ralando o Tchan from the É o Tchan do Brasil album reminds me always of my magical year in Brazil as an exchange student, where I made beautiful memories in the dry rural regions of my country state Goiás on a fazenda (farmhouse), on a bus full of exchange students driving down the northeastern coast of the country and my brazilian family who gave me so much.

All these songs bring back a rush of feelings, intense and gentle, exciting and melancholy, and remind me of the wild ride of freedom I so enjoyed as a curious traveler. Life was a real adventure.

Even films are able to bring back a blast from the past; that, or a reminder of swift changes in the passing of time. Having said so much about youth, I just realized I am now two years older than Bridget Jones in the first movie. A bad TV night brought me to Bridget Jones's Diary and yes, I am two years older.

Not that it bothers me. The thirties (or any other time in life) are not a time when all women turn into desperate spinsters in need of fertilizing eggs and should all of a sudden be embarrassed for being single. 

Time is after all is just a notion, a way to measure the passing of time and give place to host all the fabulous adventures we have in life. All of life is after all perception alone.

During one of our philosophical talks, my partner and I came to the conclusion that our whole existence as human beings originates within the confinements of our brain. Our feelings, thoughts, ideas, perception, our whole spiritual and bodily existence exists within the realms of one organ, our brain. It is literally our whole world.

That leads me to the conclusion that youth and aging are truly conceptual, a notion of the theatre that is life.

The instruments that tricker memories from hibernation are a time machine, a way to explore life through the wide lenses of frameless shades that change colour depending entirely on perception and mood.

Life would be so dull without all these accessories of life. And I love life, my life just the way it is, the way it was, and the enigmatic and glorious adventures of what will be.