The Early Years

I've always found it so bizzare that we forget the first 3 or 4 years of our lives. When you ask people what their earliest memory was, it's either some vague thing like the pattern of the carpet or drapes from when they are really little, or some very exciting event.

Personnally, I remember when my father caught a snapping turtle on the front porch of my grandparent's duplex by having it bite the end of a broom handle, then walked off to a pond to release it. That snapper must have been as big as I was. I might have been 3. I also remember this beige and maroon carpet, possibly because I was in a high chair staring at it for hours. As far as I know, I'm not even remembering the snapping turtle event firsthand. Maybe I'm remembering the retelling of the story with a picture supplied by imagination, not the actual event. I have to admit, my picture of the incident in my head is not very clear.

I've often thought that it's possible that you don't think like an adult human when you're little. Maybe we train people to remember things and think in words, but without that training, you're kind of a different animal. Maybe language is not only learned, but it displaces some other more primative form of thinking. I've heard specualation that humans may have an inherent form of ESP that you unlearn as you grow. That language interferes with the thoughts you are hearing directly from people. I remember one person explaining that often you will speak soothing words to a baby, while inside you're fuming and wondering if it will ever stop crying! If you could read minds, you would be confused with the mixed message, and eventually, when you learned language, you would stop listening to the telepathic stream.

What would happen if you didn't forget those first few years? You wonder how much of early life is simply filled with terror and the confusion of early self-awareness. What if you remembered what it was like to not understand everyone around you and to be powerless because you were tiny and weak?

How would remembering your early infancy affect your beliefs and understanding of the world? Maybe sudden awareness would lead to a completely different form of religion.

I wrote about a physical phenomenon effecting sand dunes and large storms, where impact with a larger object causes the smaller object to be absorbed and later re-emerge intact, but different. This is kind of what happens to little minds. They have their own structure, which impacts with the real world, gets absorbed, and emerges out the other side, something new. Like rebirth.