The Importance of Your Earliest Memories

What is the first thing you remember about your life? My first memory is about an event that occurred when I was about three or four years old. 


I vividly recall walking up to the place where the local barber had his shop in the front of his home. It was a small white house with lots of windows in the front. My mother was holding my hand as we approached the front door, opened it and walked into the shop. 



I only vaguely remember what the old barber looked like but I do recall that he had a bundle of silver hair and a broad smile on his face every time I looked at him. He took out a long board that was covered with red vinyl with brass studs all around the edges and placed it over the arms of the barber chair. He picked me up and sat me on the red board and then whisked a cloth around my chest and neck. It was my first haircut. 



Mom stood next to me as the barber clipped the large curls it had taken me all my life to grow. As they were clipped, the barber gave them to my mother who placed them lovingly into a plain white envelope. After the last curl was removed from my head and put safely into the envelope, Mom licked the flap and sealed it with a kiss.

Why are our earliest memories important? It's not as important what we recall as how we remember what happened at the beginning of our awareness of our lives. If the event we recall is remembered as being loving, warm, supportive, encouraging, comforting, enabling or embracing, for example, then I believe this sets the stage for subsequent experiences in life.

Let me go a step further. We have the ability to not only remember our past but to re-member it, as well. Our past is like a deep mine that is filled with all sorts of material. When we recall events and experiences in our lives we're really mining our memories and arranging them in certain ways together with emotions we may have actually had at the time or that we're adding at the time of our remembering. In other words, we have the ability to re-arrange (re-member) our memories as we recall them. We can mine our memories for multiple meanings and not be confined to the narrow range of what we think actually happened. 



Often we commit what I call “memory merge:” we merge our recollections of what happened from various sources and from different time periods into a single memory. This could be because these various sources were incomplete in and of themselves and were easily combined into a single whole or it could be that we're being creative with our past in our effort to make sense out of it. There could be any number of reasons why this occurs. The point is that memory is flexible, pliable, fluid and, on both the conscious and subconscious levels, to some degree within our control.

Your earliest memories set the stage for the way memory itself is molded and how it treats and molds the past. However, you still have the ability to alter the psychic and emotional environment within which your memories emerge. If you don't like the way your life has been going or if you feel that your life has been marked by dark circumstance and negative experience, you can begin to change it by mining your memories for additional meanings that are more supportive of a loving, positive life. You can re-member your memories to fashion them into a caring corpus characterized by compassion, forgiveness and self-acceptance.

Re-live your life through re-membering it and mining it for multiple meanings. You'll find that not only will your outlook on your future improve but your respect for your past will improve, too.