You won't know

The other day I was talking to my brother, and he was telling me how in one of his classes, his professor was discussing how people's minds could be "shocked" into remembering certain things. We tend to store a lot of information in our heads, but we don't always readily have access to that information. We can be given details concerning a particular event that we can't remember, and our memories are suddenly "jolted" into remembering. What this professor was saying was that our minds could similarly be reminded of parts of our lives that we've never been able to remember, like our early childhoods or even our time of birth.

Now here's what I found interesting. When the professor brought this up, my brother thought that his time of birth would probably feel very disorienting and dirty, what with all the bodily fluids and whatnot. I thought exactly the same thing.

However, one girl in the class spoke up and said something along the lines of this, "I think it would be interesting to know what experiencing life for the first time would be like."

My brother told me that when she said that, it completely changed his perspective on the whole situation, and I'd have to agree.

That's a really powerful statement. Experiencing life for the first time... I really cannot fathom what that could be like.

I started to think about the whole thing, and I started to wonder why it is that we can't remember that far back into our lives. I came up with the idea that our memories are founded off of our emotions, and at such a young age, we don't have any knowledge of emotions to formulate memories. Sure, babies cry, and you could attribute that response to some kind of emotion, but at such an early age, crying is only a reflex, so that argument doesn't really hold any water.

So that would imply that emotions are learned, which would bring up the whole nature vs. nurture dilemma. Hmm... if that were the case, I think it could be said that at such an early age, we do have instinctive emotions, but since we don't lack the means to define them at that time, we don't retain the memories.

Arg, I don't know about any of this really. Memories might not be tied to emotions at all, it's just a thought that I had. Hmm, I wonder why I decided to write about this in the first place. I guess part of me is really curious as to what experiencing life for the first time would feel like, and I'm trying to project what that feeling could be on one of the emotions I am familiar with. In reality, it might be based off an emotion that I'm not familiar with... something that I would have only experienced that one time.

Hmm, very interesting. It's sort of like that emotion I described in my post where I talked about the best day of my life. I might not have a name for it, but I know it exists.

Well, I think I'm going to end here for now. I might come back and add more to this, but probably not. I doubt I'll ever experience anything that I could attribute to this 'elusive' emotion, and even if I do find something, I have no way of knowing if that's the same emotion I would have felt at the beginning of life.

I'm okay with that, I suppose. Sometimes wondering about life's intricacies makes it more enjoyable. I don't need to know everything, and if I did, things would get boring pretty fast.

Question time:

What is your very first memory?

Until next time,

Stay frosty