A better way to view our childhood memories.

Hi Pose: I think that's a pretty good way to see our childhood memories. Instead of feeling sad about the days that just have gone and will never come back it's more useful and beautiful to think about this as a whole process where we have learnt about as human beings and concentrate on the things that we have took from that stage in our lives. ALVARO

Yes, I definitely agree with you. I have often thought how wonderful it would be to be able to go back to our childhood, but with the wisdom and the insight that we have today - just to be able to better understand our actions, as you say, and to see when we made mistakes and how we have learnt from them as our future selves. It would be a very interesting experiment to see just how much we have really grown and developed in our lives!

I totally agree....I think alot of who we are stems from our childhood...our memories....or experiences even birth order. Even in court with a troubled child they can trace things back to their experiences and sometimes those experiences haunt them....and turn then into people whom society can't change.....or accept...

I can only recall bits and pieces about my childhood. Most of my recollections are happy memories, but there are sad ones, too. Many of the characters in my childhood are gone forever. I remember them fondly and am grateful they made my childhood a phase of life worth recalling.

Hi pose123, I agree on that. We learn from our past. To reminisce the good old days are just a great way to cherish precious moments that happened in our lives. We see improvements and progress, we learn from our mistakes and we become more wiser.

You are right. But the statement cannot be hold true for every person who was bad to us or who made our situations worse. When I was in middle school I was bullied very badly. I held a grudge against those people. They were so mean that getting personal with them was never possible. After I grew up, therefore, I did not have a chance to understand their point of view. Now many of these people are my friends on Facebook. Strangely, not all of them really went away from their savage habits. They are all in their 20s now. I noticed that they still went around bullying my other friends who went to middle school with us. I cannot have compassion for those bullies really. Do they ever realize how their behavior is affecting others? I am now more confident of myself. So I made up my mind that if they come to harass me I would attack back. So far only one girl tried this. I lashed out and she got embarrassed. Fortunately, what I said was shown in all our friends' news feed because all 30 of us are connected to one another. Notice that I mentioned my confidence level. It really does not mean that I have got braver because of those bullies. The lady luck was with me for which I was able to go through different good situations in my life. They really had no hand in this. That is why, I said that we cannot have compassion for every person who made us feel miserable in our childhood.

Most of my childhood memories are good and I don't feel the need to see it from today's viewpoint except to compare it to my life now - sort of navel gazing and not productive at all for me.

Most of what I learned by doing this revisiting was that what I had taken from the memory was a child's view and when I reviewed it the reality was very different. A memory I had was full of fear and when I revisied it as an adult I discovered that the reality was a joyful experience. I was 5 or 6 at the most and my Dad came home from work and grabbed my Mom and spun her around and around, all the time throwing money up in the air, they were both yelling and my Mom was crying. I was terrified and hid under the table I just knew with all that action and yelling that something terrible had happened and it had to do with money. I don't remember what happened next, but this memory stayed with me. When I revisited this as an adult I realized that my parents were happy, my Dad had just won his first case that paid in cash, usually we got food or work in trade, times were very hard in our small town. After I realized how far off I was on this memory I started reviewing more and my childhood became much clearer.

my childhood was never crystal clear, but certain memories are nostalgic. I was a child who never liked the limelight, but the present me is more courageous and can face the crowd with more confidence, either way there is still that child who dislikes attention and reminds me to never be proud or boastful. Through the years that made me who I am today, I am always grateful for the kind of childhood that I had, thanks to those memories I can see my life as a work in progress.