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Four Mile Run and those things we don’t remember

Sometimes we yearn to see great waves in the ocean, but it is a small stream like this – which runs through an ordinary landscape of clusters of trees, houses, factories, and apartment buildings along some roads – that evokes a feeling of intimacy in which we always find comfort. I think it is because the stream is one of those things connected to our childhoods that we may not remember but are never gone – only buried deep down in neuron circuits.

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Say an uncle who lift the baby you up above his shoulders and that first taste of ecstasy of flying, and the same hand held yours walking across small alleys to a fish market to buy tiny sea snails wrapped in cone-shaped paper. Or a parasol tree in the front yard under which the small you sat on a small wooden stool looking at some drawings to learn Chinese characters – they were like figures of sparrows, magpies, or little people; a purple flower, bell-shaped, fell on a page, and the whole book was lit up by a light fragrance. Or an autumn moon burst through clouds all of a sudden and the miraculous feel of being in the middle of a corn field showered by moonlight.

Things like these from the early days even before we can say words and the feelings attached to them form the emotional core that dictates how we feel today. Our intellects have grown out of the past, but our emotions don’t. As life goes on, we keep looking for that uncle whose hands are a bit rough but warm. We’d look outside the window at night seemingly unconsciously. In early May I was so glad to spot two parasol flowers on the brick sidewalks at Georgetown in the rain and almost cried.