Have you ever wondered what it would be like to lose your memory? Imagine, for example, that you go out walking in wintertime and fall flat on your back on the slippery surface, bumping your head to the ground. You wake up after some minutes with people around, helping you to get up. But your head-bump as left something wrong… You are confused… You’ve lost your memory! You don’t remember a thing…

My first thought is that this would be an oppurtunity. This would be an excellent chance to start over. Enjoy the fact that you’re free from all your subconscious and psychological habits that have been keeping you back. A fresh start!

But maybe there would be some things that you would want to keep… maybe there were some memories that defined the person you had become. Well, you never what know what tomorrow brings, so in case I should trip and suffer amnesia, here’s my letter to myself.

Dear Martin,

You are a light-hearted person, and you are usually cheerful. That’s what people like about you. People like you in general, and that’s because you don’t stress or worry easily. You smile easily and have a positive effect on people. So keep that up.

You are good with children, and you really like children. They remind you that nothing in life really matters, we’re all born naked and innocent and that’s how we will die to. All we have in between is time spent playing. Being around children and teenagers makes you feel more alive, they are full of energy, and you like being around them. This is probably why you’ve spent several years of your life working with them, in the summer and part-time with school.

You’ve been lucky with friends through the years, and you’ve been smart enough to keep the good ones around. But you do have some friends with which you don’t have an obvious common ground to meet on, so you are losing contact. You might have to make an effort to meet these people so you don’t lose contact.

Girls are the rainbow of your existence and sometimes it feels like they are what makes life worth living. You really like them. You take great pleasure in keeping company with girls, even without any romantic element. You just simply get along with them, usually better than boys. While the number of real romantic relationships you have had is not great, it is drastically unrepresentative of the emotional landscape that has quaked and moved and formed within you. So far, you have not been a man of serious relationships, but you and your life have the potential to reverse that any day.

You have not been very much involved with arts in your life, except as the onlooker and appreciator. You have, though, written a couple of poems and a short story and painted a painting or two, so the talent is not altogether nonexistent. You have a great yearning to learn to play the piano, and to learn to beat the drums, whether the regular rock’n’roll drums or the African type. Don’t forget to pursue that.

You like to travel to faraway places and get to know people from those places. You have the talent for adapting to different cultural environment and you like it most of all. I would tell you to be true to your dreams and talents and learn languages, but I know it’s inevitable. It’s something you were born to do. It will happen no matter what I say. So have fun on that one!

When you learn new things, whether it’s the political organization of the Japanese parliament, how car engines work or why birds make sounds, you like to –actually you have to– learn and understand them deeply, and put them in context with your current understanding of everything else. You sometimes have a difficulty understanding things when they are put to you, even if they are put simply, because they will be put to you according to the other person’s understanding, and it may take some time before you have adjusted it to fit yours.

You have a great interest in religion and spirituality, and you find it amazing how many religions and belief systems, if not all, share the same core that human beings are in essence one and the same, and that whatever deed done, propelled by the vision of such a unity, can have vast influence on the well-being of humans everywhere. You agree with that principle and you have, in a way, found it to be your calling to bring about change in that direction, using your own talents, personality and vision of the world.

As you can see in my description of yourself, you are a deep thinker. While getting lost on the TGV of thought is a wonderful thing let me offer you a piece of advice, for those occasions when you have a hard time getting back up to shallow waters: Life is far to important to be taken seriously. Remember to kick back and enjoy the simple things too. Sunny? Play football.