The delicious biscuit crumbles in my mouth with each bite. Its aroma, its texture, the tastes all transport me to another time.
Long ago as a kid living in Kuwait, each summer I would travel with my parents to England to visit close family friends. We would disembark the plane on landing and take the long taxi to their house. The moment I would enter I would rush to the living room where I knew there was a tin container titled Danish biscuits, but inside were these yummy digestive chocolate flavored biscuits under the couch. It was a grounding treat after a long journey.
I can remember vividly the pinkish colored sofa, the smells of the Indian rice lamb cooking on the kitchen stove down the hall, the invigorating fragrance of the soap in the upstairs bathroom at the end of the narrow stairs. On the rare occasion that someone goes to England and they ask me what they can bring back for me, I ask for one thing, one packet of these biscuits. So on this trip I brought back two !
Throughout our lives, since the moment we are born our bodies keep track of all our external and internal sensations. Everything that we feel, hear, taste, smell, touch and see are all hooked with a memory of some sort and locked away within the water of our bodies residing in our fat cells. This is just one of the reasons why when we lose weight, ergo fat cells, the memories of our past pop up to be processed as they are released with the loss of the fat.
Memories percolate up like the vapor aromatics of a boiling soup in a sauce pan on the stove. We regulate our environment or rather we adapt to our environments by storing memories through visual, auditory, olfactory and other sensory cues. When they bustling surroundings are too great to process the body’s miraculous computer stores all senses and shelves the experiences like a library does its books, only to processed later in life.
Our nervous system is fluidly hardwired to take in sensations front he external or internal climates and instantly store, remove or process the data. All conscious and subconscious splits and thoughts are stored for future analysis.
Grateful for this body to be able to have kept these memories of my childhood “alive”. On deeper exploration, I recall that these Digestive biscuits were like a “reward” for having undergone a tiring flight and car ride and walking with suitcases to a foreign land and then plopping myself on the sofa, I would feel safe and happy, and for a kid that was all I wanted to feel in that moment. The cookies serve that purpose.
We each will create attachment to objects, people through our senses in order to understand our world, and each experience of our past becomes a memory to aide us to navigate the future faster through instantaneous recall. What a fantastic system our nervous system and body has generated.
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I love you
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