What is your best memory? And what did it teach you? What did you learn from it? What window or windows on experience did it open for you?
During my childhood years, once I saw one young man taking care of a wounded puppy on the road by quickly admitting it to a hospital and paying the fees. That was one of the best memory I can recall even now , because it taught me that we should always help the innocent, distressed animals and human beings not for showing our caliber but to prove that we are not at all cruel beings.
Continuous growth in my academic career. I learnt and developed patience, that became my strong point in addition to academic and administrative competence.
How very lovely, dear Marwan !
To me, your question has the scent of flowers in the mist of past precious treasures.
Thank you!
I own loads of lovely memories, that make me a richer person. And, as much as I have gone through several difficulties and annoying vicissitudes, I always tend to completely forget /erase bad moments from my memory. (In this sense, I should answer that all my entire life is a huge great memory, scented with flowers and sun, and many smiles. - I always remember people's faces with smiles. - )
This said, one of my favorite memories is from my earliest childhood, with my 5 year old brother, in the garden where my father planted colourful tulips in raws, by a huge lawn. I visited that house, some 40 years after we moved, and everything seemed smaller and greyish. I had to crawl to bring back my memories and go around. (I was actually caught at it by one of the neighbours, now a grey curved old man , because he thought I was a burglar, crawling around the gardens. When I looked up to explain, he remembered my face and gave me a hug. I was the noisiest child in the neighbourhood, and people would have remembered me, for sure!)
Ah, but you want lessons from the past. Yes, there are a few: As I visited that old house, one of the things that I carefully analysed was the entrance gate, still painted in green, but a bit rustier. I remember having three of my finger tips crashed by that gate, that my brother closed shut on my passage. I was taken to hospital to operate and to get fully recovered.
I can't remember any pain, but I do remember that my Mother fainted from the smell of the ether anaesthetic they poured on my fingers.
I managed to follow the whole proceedure that reestablished my fingers, and the lesson I got from this ordeal, was a lesson for life: As I admired the supreme delicateness and firm motions of the hands that treated and cured my hand, I am quite sure that this was the moment when I decided that I wanted to become a surgeon, at the age of four!
How very over kind and rosy your words are, dear Maria! Nor are the words of dear Shankhadeep, Subhash and Kamal forgotten!
Dear Marwan,
My all travels abroad and meetings with other cultures, people, visiting art galleries were always enriching and rewarding. RG compensates such needs in some way when I'm at home in Poland. Warm Regards, BBB
Dear Friends All,
Your kind words and reminiscences are like those daffodils!
Dear Marwan,
My best memories are of my childhood with dolls and a house of cloth where I could hide me!!
I learned with it that every stage of life is good and that is very good play and play and see everything in the best way.
Have a nice week!
Vanessa
Dear Marwan
Your question has aroused in me a real and vivid memory I will never forget. In fact my best memory is the reflection of the happiness of others especially that of my mother when I completed my graduation course, an engineering degree. Indeed, this memory is forever engraved in my memory and in my heart for this illiterate late wife who gave birth to me, educated me and encouraged me in my studies to become the man I am. An Arab poet said that the "mother is a school." Thank you for the question that got me excited.
I greet you fraternally
Djamel
Dear Bubba,
Your words are full of wisdom and philosophy and thought and reason and imagination all at once. I reiterate: We ought to be thankful for the beauty in our lives and the wonderful things we've accomplished and Who made them possible! Well-said, dear Bubba!
Dear @Marwan, I may say it is my wonderful childhood and insouciance! Family in whole! Joy!
My children did not have such childhood! They were bombed by NATO in 1999! We will never forget! Some nice Dutch people made fine movie on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdoYtzmLf6I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
Dear Marwan,
You are right.
How right carry the words of Bubba!
However, the situations I remember best are those where I was wrong, and could amend, because it was there that I learned that beautiful life is.
Dante.
I recall my childhood when i play football with my friends and i remember also my school and my favorite teachers
Dear Ljubomir !
Don't worry. Children tend to enjoy life as it is. Even if it is horrible for us to think of your children being bombarded, they will overcome, if you yourself don't make too much a problem of it. Children have they own ways of overcoming horrible memories from the past. I know I did. As I reported, in my anecdote, I managed to have great fun during cold-blood surgery to my fingers, studying the fine motion of my surgeon's hand. I must have cryed as loud as I could, and my mother fainted, but all I can remember is the motion of my surgeon's hand, and the tulips in my garden.
Nevertheless, your statsment is a schocking reminder of the cruelties of war and what it can destroy in the minds of innocent children.
I'll keep praying every night for peace in the World.
Everybody deserves good childhood memories.
Dear Bubba,
I can't resist quoting again from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, for you:
« Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present. »
«The greates deception men suffer is from their own opinions.»
Dear Marwan,
It is a very good question, it asks the good or bad memories of the past of our lives. My childhood was bright, happy and with a sense of hope of one country developed in science and technology and one people heading towards the 21 century. But that is not what happened. My birth country, not my new country America but Ethiopia turned in to an ever seen direction and socio-political system, regression to a medieval existence.
The current government whose genesis is ethnicity, permits the division of the country in to two, Ethiopia and Eritrea and left Ethiopia land locked losing its long and natural sea boundary, the left of Ethiopia is subdivided in to ethnic enclaves, enclaves created based on ethnicity. Ethiopians are asked to declare their ethnicity and they are no more one people but divided by their ethnicity and rule their own ethnic enclaves. It is an entropy and a big bang phenomena that happens in my birth country.
What one can learn from this is that society and social issues are always non-deterministic and chaotic, a little perturbation from its normal functioning creates unprecedented and destructive results in which no one will have an immediate control and solution. Small perturbations were the causes of the two world wars, all ethnic conflicts and genocides that took place all over the world. It is therefore a learning opportunity that socio-political matters always require wisdom.
Dear Marwan
I think after what Kamal statment I cant split things that more significant.
"Into my heart's treasury/I slipped a coin/ that time cannot take/nor thief purloin/ oh better than the minting/of a gold-crowned king/ is the safe-kept memory/ of a lovely thing."
-- Sara Teasdale (U.S. poet).
It is hard for me to select a single memory out of a largely happy life that I've been fortunate to lead. With my wonderful memories, I make my future. It's like dropping pebbles into a pond, watching them expand into steppingstones, then using them to step to the other bank.
My best memories of life go back to the years before 1967 when the east bank & the west bank of the river Jordan were united. It is true that we were generally poor but the relationships were warmer & the people used to sleep with the doors shut but not locked with keys (indicative of more ethics & security).
Dear Professor,
One of the memories I have is when still very young I received as a present a Geometry Box. The uncle who gave me this present thought me how to use this instrument to form different shapes of flowers which I painted in different colours. As a young girl I imagined myself as a teacher and I used to teach the pots in the garden. At present I am teaching nursing students and for me these are the different shapes of flowers that hopefully will contribute more to the globalized society of today.
Regards
Carmen Camilleri
The childhood and the school age were the more beautiful moments. At primary school i was so cherished by my teachers and administrative staff and so happy with my friends; with my family i enjoyed too much holidays' boat trips. At higher education school too i enjoyed many friendships, learning and hard work.
Dear Marwan,
Dear All,
Life is a process, a chain of events. I hope you have survived many pleasant events thus I think it is better to remember typical agreeable and pleasurable moments of our life. For me, it is to be in the society of decent, honest and interesting people. Many of you are such people.
I do hope that all our RG friends have enjoyed pleasant moments in their lives, dear Andras, interesting and happy moments that are worthy of being remembered!
I like to re-call all the experiences of life in which what seemed bad at the time, became good later. For example, a disease that I passed with no damage and that made me reconsider the true values of my life.
Childhood and teenage life, of course. But that's only in retrospect. When I was younger, I remember complaining about my lack of perceived freedom, seldom realizing that freedom comes with responsibility. Human nature tends to appreciate the value of something only when it's not there, but rarely when it is already present. The biggest and best lesson I've learned is to appreciate what we have, while we have it.
Since dear @Marwan have raised this question, I have used to read about! ‘Story of my life?’ The contents and functions of reminiscing is fine article which I have attached for the followers! "... three interconnected issues arising from the question: ‘how to support reminiscing?” The first issue examines why people reminisce, looking at the functions it serves both for the individual and the social group. The second issue relates to the types of stories people recollect and share, which may sometimes be difficult or distressing events in their lives and how to deal with these. This connects to the third issue examining the process of choosing materials such as photographs and artifacts to stimulate people to recollect and recount their personal stories...!"
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/remchiwork/papers/astell-stimulating-reminiscing-bp-aja.pdf
Great reading. Thank you Ljubomir !
Nostalgia has the burden of tending to make us stop and overlooking on the past.
The right attitude is to move on with the positive impulse of the experiences gained. (should they be good or bad!)
Sharing those memories and experiences , just as Ljubomir rightly stated, brings social value to these reminiscences.
I thank Marwan for this question.
Thank you, dear Ljubomir and Maria, for this very subtle and sound analysis as usual!
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence. Sholem Asch (1880–1957)
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