Streams of Life (14)
Earlier on my friend and I went to the local supermarket to buy some food for dinner. Passing by the frozen food section, my friend, much out of his expectation
, spotted the ice lolly with lemon flavor, which accompanied him to the hardest
time in Nanjing last year. How vividly it brought me back to the sweaty and incredibly stuffy and scotching summer, he said when we were on the way back home.
I listened to it without a word. But I understood how he exactly felt. And he knew I did. The first few nights I moved in he had told me roughly how he made out
to come to China, how he managed to get to Nanjing after he arrived, and how he
finally made the decision to come to Shanghai. He said it concisely and with a
detached tone, as if it were not his own story, as if he didn’t care.
But the joyful moment of seeing those lollies in the supermarket betrayed him. The lollies were so ordinary that it would be bizarre that someone would like them without special reasons. For my friend, the period staying in Nanjing was pain
-taking and confusing. Teaching several classes per day was tough. Living in a suburban area without a single friend around made it worse. The summer was extraordinarily hot that even going out at night was at the boundary of the impossible. So the icy lemony flavor of the lollies he had, which itself was pretty incidental, later became the trigger on his memory web to that very period.
I had the similar feeling at times. Items I owned were pretty ordinary, even trivial at first, but because of somebody or some special events became full of meaning later. In this sense personal attachment is a wunderkind. Whatever it touches and lingers upon, the very thing can become special, and any random moment can suddenly become significant and full of deeper emotions.
On the memory course I am listening to at the moment, the host said it’s our experience and our memory related that builds up our personality. In other words,
it’s the storing memory that defines us as an individual. So in this way, all happenings are meaningful, no matter how insignificant they themselves may look:
To my friend, the lollies are not just lollies any more, they becomes something
else. To me, the icy lemony flavor stands out as well. Somewhat it becomes part
of my memory, which relates to the remote past, the time when the tracks of my
friend and my life hadn’t converged together.
I believe on this world people are the most sophisticated of all, which largely
should be imputed to their being able to think and feel. Because of their ability of thinking, things all become well connected and organized. And because of their being capable of feeling, things are not just things, they are not just identical people but become varied individuals, and the world they reside in accordingly becomes kaleidoscopic and diverse...
