Memory and Pace of Life

It is quite wrong to endorse the fact that people should always live “only for the moment” – as is popularly advertised by the West – which seems to result in over consumption of resources and we ending up becoming consumers to all sorts of experiences and if I stretch things more, then we become tourists to our own thoughts!

What do I mean when I say ‘tourists to our own thoughts’?

For this, we need to look closely to what should thought compose of ideally, and how it generates a quality of memory, that generally results in a feeling of empathy or a connect with the environment? This kind of thought can be generated in any environment and in any part of the world by any society. The nature of a kind of thought that I am referring to, is found in history of mankind and current primitive and vernacular cultures. The origin of thought is influenced by geography (place/ climate/ materials/ resources for existence). Geography has dictated ways of staying together, dependence on Nature, forming responses towards architecture, art, culture, food and clothing. The thought required to respond to all concerns of existence and its dependence on environment. The concerns were common to all, and these, through history have formed a way of doing things, that we call ‘culture’. An important component of such cultures is ‘traditional wisdom’ (which I am referring to as collective memory) which deals with our nature of existence, our role in the environment, our value systems for sustenance of life and our appropriate responses to the future. Important point here is to note that thought had a strong element of acknowledging interdependence on systems of ecology. ‘I’ am not just ‘me’ alone, but the entire environment. Naturally, to come to this state of understanding means that enormous time seems to have been spent by generations to come to this realization of interconnectedness – it is not a one day job! Architecturally, it means a ‘diffused’ or ambiguous or blurred architecture of flexibility, porosity, multiuse, multifunctional and communal.

We contrast this nature of thought with a contemporary urban situation of too fast a rate of change in everything we think or do. The newness of everything, because of the rate of change forces us to delink connections with every other kind of phenomenon around us. We don’t know the relationship of the phenomenon with us anymore and neither is it felt necessary to relate! We are compelled to consider only the “moment” of existence and the only thing that is possible to do in a moment is to consume! Thus, we have become mere spectators and consumers of experiences. Experiences are fleeting, fragmented and therefore unconnected. We don’t know the past (and justify by saying that It is irrelevant) and we don’t care for the Future (saying that the Present is the only reality). We end up consuming resources, being extremely arrogant, indifferent to the environment and we remain too engrossed in ourselves and remain disconnected with everyone else. The disconnection goes to the point that we don’t seem to know our selves either! What a grim picture have we created for ourselves! In extreme case, the architecture of space may go from being highly exclusive, privatized, to schizophrenically dictated by wild imaginations. So how is this shaping our memory? We can’t seem to make any sense of the world we are inhabiting.

Hence, to make sense, ‘memory’ plays a pivotal role. By memory, we mean a given value, we mean our relationship with the overall environment, we mean our collective wisdoms and we mean the relation of past-present-future.

We need to critically see our own thoughts and actions and what they induce in our consciousness.