by Patrick Tay

Created on: December 03, 2008

Most individuals associate childhood memories with their first love - memorable and wonderful. This can often be seen in school alumni dinners where one's childhood memories will be brought up for discussion way into the wee hours of the night. Childhood memories is a bond that are shared among most of us, and this is especially so for those of us whose deep friendships have been forged in academic libraries, noisy classrooms and school canteens.

I often wondered why childhood memories are often more memorable than our adult years. And the only factor that I am to identify is that of innocence. Innocence - a quality inherent in all of us- is a strange quality but like almost all things in life, follows the natural cycle of life. It appears pure and demure when we are in our infancy stage, acquires a tinge of mischievousness during our teenage years, reaches its full strength during our courtship and romantic phase, weakens as we reach our adult years when maturing, and comes back to life again when we enter our "second childhood" phase in our old age. It remains in us throughout our lives without giving up on us. Even in times of senility, it does not forsake us. It is our guardian angels, guiding us in taking a light-hearted approach to life and giving us a reprimanding pat on our heads when we fail to learn how to let go.

However, despite its perseverance and determination, Innocence has - over time- become a stranger to most of us. In a technologically-advanced and structured society, we become routinised, almost to the point of being automatons and cyborgs. We become merely a cog in the machinery (from a distance, observe groups of working professionals standing on an escalator as it heads up and down), a number (most of us are identified by a number on our identity cards), a statistic (when we make an enquiry, we are often referred to not by our names but by our case enquiry number). We no longer feel the same way as when we were children, and soar as high as we wished to. When we grow up, we realise that there are constraints in this world (such as different caste systems, income divide, diverse educational backgrounds, cultural differences, personal expectations), limits that we cannot go beyond no matter how hard we try. This is made worse with the influx of consumerism where some individuals no longer take the initiative to connect. And even in the event of doing so, the primary intentions lie merely with making comparisons in terms of materialistic

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