In choosing the topic of my happiest memory for this short essay I honestly anticipated that it would be a piece of cake. Little did I know that less than two minutes of sitting down staring at the blinking cursor and trying to conjure up my ‘happiest memory,’ I would still be sitting here staring at the screen over ten minutes later.
Along with my frustration, something else started to bubble to the surface that I couldn’t bring myself to ignore. Curiosity. Surely I know I have a ton of happy memories but what is it about trying to choose one that has me crippled and pining for vivid joy like neon signs through my hippocampus (the part of the brain that stores memories, if you didn’t know).
Is it because happiness is so subjective? So personal? So fleeting? Then it occurred to me that if the question actually were to write about my single crappiest memory I could easily come up with it. If not multiple ones that are competing for each other in my conscious brain like it’s the last death match in the coliseum before the Roman empire collapses. What is it about misery that attaches itself so raw right below the surface of my awareness, and that leaves happiness in an old school card catalog in a library that still uses carbon paper?
Here is the real fun part, I don’t know. I have absolutely no doubt that I could sit here and Google and research the neuroscience behind it, or the psychological reasoning trauma stays and happiness fades but sometimes I think in a world where so much information is at our fingertips the practice of wondering and letting your mind explore is a lost art.
The long forgotten art of imagination without outcome or destination. I wonder if there is some correlation between the age where we start recognizing our pain, holding onto it, preparing for it and when we start forgetting the magic of our imagination and happiness becomes the second thought. It becomes avoid pain, not take the leap and embrace the pillows on landing as the goose down feathers rocket through the air. We think about that one time we bruised our knees when we missed the pillows and now it makes us hesitate, or not jump at all. The pillows stop being the clouds of far away places we’ve created in our minds and the magic is lost to the hard floor in our childhood living rooms.
You could argue this is how we learn, lately it’s been the “fuck around and find out” viral video circulating but I think we found out at the cost of something bigger.
So maybe my happiest memory is the last one I have of that little girl who didn’t let the last time she fell out of the tree stop her from climbing it again.
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Come hang out with me more often ^^^^
or if this place isn’t your think, my instagram is: @she_runs__wild
Xx, Caitie