Sometimes old quilts are still our favorites. That’s because when we take them out, use them or look at them the patchwork triggers a memory.

This memory triggers an emotion.

The emotion evoked can cause us to feel happy, content, excited, or sometimes something not so nice, like sadness.

We are constantly compartmentalising our life on an unconscious level. Sorting everything we see, hear, touch and even smell into the patches that make up our life.

Within that we even go so far as to label the nuances like the shades, feel or content of the fabric that is who we are.

The unconscious mind has a system in place. Its purpose is to make sense of the world. It is constantly scanning and categorizing the experiences that bombard us from day to day, minute to minute and moment to moment.

No piece of our life is forgotten. It’s just stored away waiting for some experience to attach itself to. It remains largely dormant, and yet, a building block that explains the new pieces of our life that are being sewn around it.

How this applies right here, right now!

Sitting here in the Melbourne (Australia) airport lounge I’m adding a little piece to my quilt of life. No, not the current, physical, project I have on the go.

Rather, the patchwork quilt that is my life.

Just being here stitches in a little extra fabric in the form of memories; both old and new.

The memory that has been triggered right now is one of a boyfriend past! For a brief moment I thought he was walking towards me as if the 25 years of separation had not settled between us.

The man in question smiled at me (maybe it was the fact I was staring at him with my mouth open!) and of course the illusion was broken. The proverbial “second glance” that makes it obvious that our mind was ‘tricked’ and the experience doesn’t match the quilt that we were comparing it to.

This is where the compartmentalizing and sorting kicks in. In a moment of time, my unconscious mind has dragged up the patchwork quilt that was our time together.

I compare the colour of what is to the memories of the ones I had originally used to sew that block into my life.

Are the colours just as vivid or have they faded. Is the hue a match to the ones I used? Do I still like the quilt I sewed all those years ago? When I snuggle my face into the memories how do they make me feel?

This is not a drawn out process although in the conscious expounding it could be. We do this so quickly that sometimes the quilt hasn’t even been fully dragged out of the cupboard of our memory when we’re stuffing it back in again.

When the memories are ‘bad’ or hurtful it can be that the cupboard door is only cracked an inch before we slam it closed again. Seeing that quilt is just too painful and we didn’t like the patches that it bore.

The point is that and we all have memories. Bound tightly to our emotions, they lay dormant just waiting for the trigger to spring them!

With life being made up of so many varied pieces and patches the fact that we can wrap our self securely in a quilt of our choosing on a daily basis is a blessing of comfort and peace.