Now is the Time

I once heard that when you experience something for the first time, your brain is aware of this fact, and therefore records a lot of information about the event.  For every subsequent event, your brain records less and less information, because it recognizes it has already recorded similar information, and the additional information is unnecessary.

This holds true for individual events, but I think it holds true for our youth in general.  We were experiencing life itself for the first time, and everything is a new experience, so there is a lot of hard drive space in our brains allocated to our youth. Not only that, but just as with a hard drive, this is the space our computer accesses first.

This explains a whole host of things, including why our youth is so precious to us.  It isn't just that life was simpler and without the concerns we have as adults.  It's that our minds were blank slates, and they were filled with new experiences which we can recall because they were recorded in detail.  Just the fact that those memories were recorded in such detail makes them precious, or in the case of some, a curse to be dealt with their whole lives.

A classic example of this is music.  I think this is the reason we a prone to get hooked on whatever type of music we listened to in our youth.  It is that music which has been recorded with the most intricacy in our minds.  Not only that, but it was recorded along with the other "firsts" in our lives.  Ask yourself this question.... isn't much of your most favorite and memorable music from your adolescence?  It is because you were experiencing not only the music for the first time, but also hormones for the first time.

So it is with this in mind that we watch our own children grow up.  Their minds are recording information at a furious rate.  As parents, we have a lot of influence on what that information is going to be.  My wife and I have children from the ages of 9 to 17.  Now is the time to keep this in mind.