It is time to start the rite of passage. We unpack our suitcases but carefully make decisions on what to take. We fold shirts, roll socks, and shoe and put toiletries in, like a Tetris game. We are not constrained by what we should not have inside the bag, but should not carry it with us (literal and figurative). We travel to the opposite sides of the world with these helpers in our hands, count on them and use them in need. However, what would happen when our best travel companion did not need a luggage rack, the overhead bin, and did not weigh anything at all? What, maybe, were the one thing we never would get away leaving? This is the deep suggestion of this unwarp phrase which has really become a reverberation: Let your memory be your travelling-bags.
These words are not an annulment to physical travel; it is, on the contrary, the exaltation of the internal world. It implies that the memory of our journeys in life is not the contents stored in our shops or photography and videos archives but its inert marks on our minds. It turns the travel into not just accumulation of the destinations that we visit, but accumulation of the things that we have seen and heard and felt and learnt that we will have with us long after we have been washed out of the foreign coasts. It is this travel bag of our memory, this huge and growing storehouse of our lives, this cribbed, confidential and nameless wardrobe of the self, which we can carry everywhere with us, and consult ail ton any occasion.
When memory is our luggage and mindfulness and presence our name of the game, then it is the art of packing it well and that makes it our life. When items are haphazardly thrown into a bag, which has been packed in a hurry, it is messy. Once we get there we are unable to find what we want. Also, having lived our lives with our minds on autopilots, through a whirl of experiences and distractions, the end result is a distorted and vague set of memories. We may have photographs of Eiffel Tower, yet we make no recollection of the freshness of the autumn air we inhaled on that day, the flavor of the crpe we procured of a street stall vendor, and not even the color of a delight dwelling within our hearts when we stood there.
We need to use our senses in attaining treasures that we can put in our memory bag. It is defined as an act of making a conscious intake of the surrounding world. It is not merely the sight of a sunset but that of the molten gold that pours over the horizon as well as the darkening of the colors to bruised purple. It is not about listening to music but about the vibration of the bass in the chest and feeling the sadness in one note of the violin. It is the matter of inventorying the smell of the rain on the hot road, the feel of an weather-beaten stone wall, the nuances of flavor of a meal you have only taken once in a city you have just arrived at as a guest. And these sensory bits are the fibers giving our memory their richness and life. When we are in a moment fully, we are taking that moment and folding it in the bag and we keep it safe.
The golden key to the magic of this internal luggage is the availability. It is in a boring Tuesday afternoon when you are locked up in an office and you find yourself able to close your eyes and open up a memory. At a moment, you can find yourself at a wind-beaten cliff, with water salty on the lips, and with the head cooled by the fresh ocean spray. Anxious moment is one way to bring back the memory of a loved one and remember how secure it feels having them in his arms. Once you learn how to use it, your mind will be able to visit a museum once again, to walk its halls in your mind, and become inspired by those masterpieces which you once stood in front of.
What starts as merely an activity of releasing the baggage of yesteryear is instead a potent mechanism delivering health and hardness. These selected memories become a personal source. The strength to deal with a new challenge can lie in a memory of coping with some other challenge in the past. One might have a recollection of laughs that had not been mixed up with anything, that had been just frivolity, that is often as good as an antidote to melancholy. Our bag of memory is in this respect a survival kit. In this case, it has wisdom acquired through our own failures as well as the lessons acquired through relationships, and happiness in a moment of time. It makes us aware of who we used to be and in the process brings us down to earth on who we are.
But romantizing this idea completely would be to turn a blind eye on one of the key realities that I learned during my travel: not everything we take on a trip is a souvenir and not all journeys are pleasant. A porter bag is a heavy bag and its straps bite on our shoulders. Our memories also are heavy. We also are taking with us the rough edges of the jagged rocks of grief, trauma and regret along with the shiny polished rocks of happy moments. The song can give not the pleasure but the pangs of loss. A relationship that was ended in the place can mar the memory of it.
An astute traveler will not think that he or she can just leave these heavy things behind. They have been on the trip; and the trip has mounded these travelers. The thing is not to fake that the weight is nothing, but to get to know how to carry it. This entails reliving, interpreting and harmonizing such painful memories. Other times it is to open them up in some protected environment- with a therapist, a loyal friend or write about them- to deprive them of their power to shred the material fabric of the bag itself. It is important to remember the weight; it helps us solidify our determination and learn to walk with the entire complicated and true story of our lives.
At the end of the day we become the custodians of our inner museum. We cannot change the past but we have a chance to decide what to put into the most available pockets of our bag of memories. We can improve the most valued memories by telling stories, thinking, and being thankful so that they can be brightened. When we recount an old adventure to a friend, we are reliving it and we strengthen its positive imprint. Being thankful about a simple, happy occurrence, we signify it as important.
Make your memory your traveler bag. It is an invitation to have a life full of experience, to be attentive to the world and the way you feel in the world. It is an assurance that you can get anywhere you want to go despite your physical location because you carry with you a universe. There they are, the sun-filled beaches, the silent snowy coniferous forests, the loud city, the faces of people who you have loved enough are all there, packed and ready to go. The journey is your life and the person you get to be is the total of everything you have decided to take along. Open your bag up. Which path will you go today?
The Neurological Weave
A clear understanding on the amazing dynamics of the memory bag can be of much help to help us master the art of packing as well. This process cannot be described as poetic except that it is a complicated and beautiful working mechanism of our neurobiology. Whenever we have an event that we want to memorize, the brain serves as a wizard of a weaver. This loom is the hippocampus: a seahorse-shaped section buried in the brain. It combines the different strands of an experience: the visual information decoded in the occipital lobe, the sounds the temporal lobe has processed, the feelings the amygdala has labeled; and mixes those up into a single, coherent tapestry: a new memory.
The intensity of this weave is what makes us have the ability to retrieve it later on. A momentary, sensory one-sided experience will produce a thin, weak tapestry, that is ready to unravel and decline as the human ages. This is a name registration that you heard at the party once or a phone number that you have forgotten immediately. Experience is a thick, dense and colorful tapestry but it has to be rich and multi-sensory. Just imagine a groovy meal when traveling to a foreign country. It was not just that you tasted the food. You could appreciate the bright colors, feel the intricate scent of spices, hear the sound of the restaurant plates and the foreign language and experience a profound feeling of satisfaction and discovery. Its own thread and its own color are the sensory responses, the emotional reactions. The amygdala plays the role of a color-fast dye and burns into our cognition the emotional events which happen both joyful and painful with more concentrates.
Hence, our packing our bag is a mindful way of feeding our brain with the bitterest of things possible. It implies slowing down to purposefully use more senses. It is like the difference between getting one picture of a mountain and breathing the fresh air that must be thin, hearing the silence and feeling the harsh bark of a pine tree. The photo is a single string of time, the complete sense experience is a piece of rich tapestry that you can weave yourself into the years later. The way we live it is that, we are not passively accumulating memories; we are consciously cooperating with ourselves in order to produce lasting artifacts of our experience.
When we explored the memory bag, we realized that some of the things in the memory bag are heavy-the loads of grief, failure, and heartache. We even feel like throwing them away, to love to see a lesser burden. But a higher-level wisdom shows that when these painful memories are comprehended and assimilated, they tend to become the most treasured article we have. They become altered in some form of interior alchemy, one in which their heavy burdens are transformed into a moral and emotional guides.
This is the change that is referred to as post-traumatic growth. The traveler who never missed a train, lost a passport, and never found his or her way to the streets of a foreign city in the pouring rain knows much less about travel, much less about what happens in the life of a traveler, than the one who had to work through these events and through the resultant emotions. Similarly, a life that is pain free cannot match its deeper and stronger sensibility because of coping with pain. When the edges are dulled by time and contemplation the memory of the loss becomes the greatest lesson in how valuable love and connection is. When the pain of shame has mellowed, the memory of failure is turned into a lesson of humility and perseverance, and of innovation. Confronted memory of fear leaves the priceless keepsake of our own daring.
It is a re-packing process. The heavy thing can not be taken away, but one can alter the manner in which it is stored. We have been able to enfold the hard memory in the fluffy rags of self-kindness, forgiveness and comprehension. This is something that can be left at the bottom of the bag and its weight will serve to give us a steady base instead of an uneven load. When we do so, we overgood stop the memory being the source of any recurring pain and make it a source of some deep understanding. It guides us, with its needle reminding us to be more understanding, to be stronger and take stronger steps, and to better experience the beauty that comes with that brief moment in time that we call our life. We are no longer scared of the weight and we appreciate it because that is what makes us strong.
It is a re-packing operation. What is heavy cannot be removed but one can change the way in which it is stored. We have been capable to wrap the uncompromising memory within the comfortable rags of self-indulgence, indulgence and understanding. This can also be placed at the bottoms of the bag and the weight can be used to provide us with a stable rather than a lopsided bulk. Doing so, we relegate once and for all the memory as the origin of any pain recurring and turn it into the origin of some profound insight. It leads us with its needle serving as a reminder that we should be more understanding and be more forceful and take more forceful measures and be more alive and feel more the beauty that comes with that short time in this world we call our life. The weight does not scare us anymore and we love it as that is what makes us strong.
Lastly, we are those who are keen to note that our travel bag does not get loaded individually. Heirlooms live with us in our own luggage: the memories loaded before we were ever born. Indeed, we all carry a collective suitcase, a cultural and family-based trunk of stories, traditions and experiences of previous generations. These are the reminiscences of our relations, our societies and our traditions.
And this generational baggage holds the recipe to meal our grandmother prepared, a taste and love memory transferred through hands and time. It encapsulates the sound of a lullaby in a language we might have forgotten how to speak but there is no delay in the emotional impact of the song. It bears the burden of the past as it harbor’s the tales of migration, of struggle, of celebration and of survival which is what we find our identity. To a resident of Lahore this union luggage may consist of the faint aroma of motif flowers in the balmy evening, the political monument of Suleiman the Magnificent in the wartime stones of the Badshah Mosque, and the twisted, inherited memory of Partition – a history of loss and endurance, that colors much of the Lahoti psyche.
