equus

Are there times in everyone's life that create life important changes - changes equal to the importance of life itself, or percieved that way?

My apologies for over posting but at the moment one thread is sparking a new thought which I'm just as curious about - this is one of them.

I think the majority of my defining moments happened very young. One was asking why 'he' drank meths (in the uk = metholated spirits, paint stripper), it's blue or purple colour meant I knew it was poison, I was about 7. The answer I recieved was that he drank because it was poison - probably inaccurate but as I later learned about suicide it's inaccuracy was unimportant. The lesson I learned was about human despair, and I understood it beyond my vocabulary to describe it - it still remains a pictorial concept to me.

Another moment would be watching a black and white film of starved bodies piled into mass graves and noticing the numeric tattoo - the same as Manni's, in a moment of knowing what happened to his family, and the place Cyril talked about his troop finding by it's smell. Hatred grew in me, for a long time it was aimed at people, those who had done that, it was a vividly violent hatred.

My feelings of violence towards a nation felt reasonable, even good till something else happened that would change me. My family (being religious) took me to see Ghandi, we were the only white people there in a PACKED city cinema - I THINK I was about 8 or 9. I remembered the story so accurately that I could tell it blow by blow 20 years later when finally I watched it again. When I watched it, transfixed I learned that the hatred I held was the means of violence, that my hatred was the doer. By the end of the film I was overwhelmed with shame, shame of my nation, shame of my own thoughts, shame of my colour and I was crying silently and uncontrollabley, an Indian old lady (I knew she was indian because she wore a sari and had the stain of a tikka mark) put her hand on my head and smiled at me. This is something that doesn't stay with me in words, the picture is there but I understand it in terms of feeling. It was ok - it is still ok.

Those moments changed me. For each one I could never be exactly who I was before, in adulthood lots of changes have taken place but none as fast or as total in terms of who I am - perhaps because I have remained the person those things shaped.

Is it like this for everyone? Or anyone else? Do you have times you know changed you down to your core and lastingly?