It has been just over two months since I left Mongolia. The days pass, regardless of how I feel. I am busy setting up a new house, getting the girls into school, re-entering the bureaucracy of being an Australian citizen. My girls are getting used to just being other blond girls among many. The past two months have been a blur really.
I was reading about the science of how memories are made and then kept in the mind. They are not exactly sure, but it seems strong memories are made when we absorb as much as we can of a present moment. If enough information is collected in the working memory during an experience then our mind moves it to the long term memory. When we recollect or remember something specific often enough our memories of the event become stronger, more permanent (and they change too, depending on how we feel about life at the time of reflecting on a specific memory).
For the past two months it has been hard to create memories, each day has been a blur of unpacking, buying “necessities”, etc. I know basically what has happened, but I am not sure if certain things happened before or after Christmas, last week or last month. But I made a new memory this week while sitting in the chair at my dentist. I won't bother explaining why I was there, other than the dentist had come in on his day off to sort out my problem. After six needles I could still feel pain, but the dentist had to keep on going. So with his face five centimetres from mine I closed my eyes, held myself with my arms across my chest, and just concentrated on breathing. I wasn't thinking of Mongolia, I wasn't thinking of Sydney, I wasn't thinking of anything other than getting through each moment. The result was that my memories are so strong I can feel the drill now.
This blog has been silent for a long time. I have been looking for the words to conclude my time in Mongolia, a fitting epitaph for the experience. Strangely enough my time with the dentist and my recent reading about memory making has given me some words. Much of my time in Mongolia became routine, walking to and from the office, eating lunch at the same collection of four or five places that did ok vegetarian food, writing proposals, writing email, keeping the house together. Bits and pieces of this experience are in my memory, but they are already soft-focus, something I recall and embellish to make funny when explaining to others the normality of living in Mongolia.
But in my heart there are memories when I absorbed every moment. Sometimes because of pain (squatting over the pit toilet in Bogd after half a glass of fresh camel milk). Sometimes because of pleasure (the vista of bright orange wild flowers carpeting the base of pine trees when we crested a ridge on a summer field trip).
In the three years I lived in Mongolia I travelled extensively, at my last count maybe 30 or so villages across eight provinces. I have memories to recall about places (being terrified caught in the summer storm in Henti; midnight in the hospital in Ulaanbaatar looking for a doctor; climbing the peak of the small mountain on the edge of Tosensengel at sunset and listening to a friend play his harmonica). I have memories of people (Bek running dirt full of worms through his hands; Turuu sliding the 4WD through powder snow for hours, then admitting he was having great fun; Tseggi's radiant smile and her ability to do anything).
When I moved to Mongolia I had only assumptions (poor, ex-communist, isolated, cold). Mongolia broke all those assumptions (except that it can be very cold). The Mongolian landscape, culture and people is wonderful. My three years there are full of moments where I was fully absorbed in the present. I now have countless memories for me to look over and think about. Bayerlaa. Rhakmet. Thank you. My challenge now is to find the same absorption with life here in Australia – and not just at the dentist.
