Memories

This was one of those days when I was in a more reflective mode. I was sitting on the floor of the back room of the house I grew up in. Mom was busy pottering in the kitchen. Memories of yesteryears came back.... though some now, hazy and many now tucked and hidden in the recesses of the brain. I read somewhere that we forget many details of our past but sometimes being in a certain place, we get flashbacks. The same goes for meeting people too. I was back in the room of my childhood... Could almost hear our own voices and imagine my younger self with my siblings... And of all things we were fighting... Some other memories included my bro and I playing...

Mom was always an early riser, still is. She is in her mid 70s now. The morning I was home, I heard her pottering in the kitchen at 4 something. She was trying to minimize the noise but still it woke me up. And so I lay in the room listening to the water running, clothes being rinsed, the sound of the mug landing on the marble table..... Familiar sounds in any home. Mom is bent now... her L5 and L4 crushed because of osteoporosis. She walks with difficulty most of the time but she still plods on. That's mom... Dad walks with a shuffle now. He has just come out of an eye op to replace his lens.

The children come home so rarely these days. And when we do, it's only for a short while.... which makes me think. Are families supposed to stay together? The wandering spirits that led my fore fathers from a distant land still plague my generation. Somehow the urge to seek for a better life... it never ends. And I see the cycle being repeated. The hope that the settling in another land will mean a better life for the next generation... The wandering spirit never stops wandering... And so, the old are left behind.... on their own. Sometimes I wonder...

Pictures are painted into our minds. I label this picture painting social conditioning. Of late, I have been contemplating more. We are all products of social conditioning. In the grand scheme of things, actually none of us can claim to know much. We are taught to claim in faith, to believe.... yet as life continue to evolve, I see many things which were held true by the generations before coming apart. Sometimes I wonder too... whether life is a series of matrices?