Cycling The Silk Road In China – Childhood Memories
Childhood memories are not pure recollections of what happened in our past.
The events if our childhood, were clouded by our understandings and translations of what happened, and by now, with the passing of the years, it is all mixed with imagination, illusions, fantasy and broken shards of fleeting feelings.
To put it in another way, our childhood memories are mostly fiction now…
To begin with, they were influenced by what we perceived as happening…
Let’s say mom came back from work and noticed that we cut her favorite dress….
She blew up on us,….. And in her blind rage, she slapped us, telling us we were very bad girls…
All we really wanted to do, was redesign her dress to be more “modern” and to practice our skills in aesthetics and design…
Because of this childhood “memory” we may associate becoming a fashion designer with pain, hardship and with attracting a negative response to our work…we will just not be aware that this incident in our “memory bank,” may be under the surface, influencing our choices today.
But what REALLY happened?
What happened was that mom may have had a bad day,…… or she really hated her job and had many difficulties in her life…
She may not have been able to afford many nice things, and the cutting of her favorite dress, reminded her of how little she had….. and how unhappy she really was…
Forgetting her role as a mother, which is to nourish her children, she blew up on us as if we were the reason for her unhappiness, and for all that is wrong in her life….
But a child does not realize all this…
The child feels that they done something BAD and that their action added to their mother’s suffering…. Making her miserable and angry.
A child lives in a belief that the whole universe begin and ends with him.
He honestly believe that HE was the center, reason and cause, for almost everything that happened in his childhood….
His parents getting divorce, or a drunken parents, was probably his fault… Etc.
Only when a child grows up to become a teenager, does the concept of being at the center of all things, get dropped.
Why am I reflecting and writing about all this today?
We just saw an exhibition by a wonderful painter artist called Xin Luoting, about the nature of childhood memories…
She explored the ideas that by now, as adults, our memories are nothing more than clouded fantasies….
All her paintings, loosely and playfully depicted herself as a child, (or her inner child,) in different poses on a bold color background.
The feelings and moods, were conveyed by the color choices. (a dreamy pink background, or dark green, etc.)
Because it is a raining here in Beijing today, we are sitting at a cafe next door to the ‘White Box’ exhibition space at 798 Art Zone, sipping tea and waiting out the rain.
