Do Images of the Past Influence our Perception of the Present? – Tags: childhood, childhood memories, family, life lessons, lifestyle, Love, memories, personal growth, psychology, self, self growth, self improvement, self love, siblings

Article | Life Lessons
How reliable are our memories?

My father used to film and photograph the three of us growing up: my brother, sister, and me. An 8mm film camera and slides. I remember sitting in the living room after a family holiday, the curtains closed, the whirring sound of the projector aimed at the wall. Those were the times!

But were they? How does what we experience in our childhood, throughout adolescence and adulthood colour our view of the past? As you are well aware, there is no absolute or objective truth. What we perceive as such is layered with our experiences and filtered through our subjective eye.

Try it yourself – you can do this at home

A simple test proves this: have a conversation/discussion with someone, play it back in your mind, and then tell the other person what has happened, and who said what. You will notice that another person has a perspective of events that might not align with yours. I remember in the far past, having had a discussion that sadly ended in a verbal fight — and how later, when that person and I tried to understand what had happened, we both had completely different ideas of (the order of) events and the cause of everything in the first place.

Down Memory Lane

Recently, my children gave us a big box that had been stored away in the attic, containing 8 mm films, slides, and photos. We went through it and, with much love and attention to detail, my wonderful husband managed to get the films working, recorded them, and transformed them into MP4 files.

For me, watching the old films and slides was a strange experience. There was the joy of recovery, the emotion of seeing my siblings and myself at such a young age, and the images of family passed away, including my parents, captured in them. My paternal grandmother, to whom I always felt close. But there was another, mixed, feeling that at first I couldn’t quite describe.

After having shared the images with my siblings, my sister said, ‘I love the films but there’s a certain sadness that goes with watching them.’ I agreed, realising that what we felt was loss.

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