TThe Baltic region is home to the largest known deposit of amber. My mother's pride and joy was a necklace, as valuable then as a pearl necklace is today. Especially valuable were pieces of amber with an insect trapped inside.
Twenty million years ago, an insect got trapped in tree resin that then became amber ... so now it's stuck like this forever like our memories which are like an insect trapped forever and unalterable in amber.
Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them the people they are today. It requires some kind of forward-looking faith in life; a strong conviction that cause and effect are linked; that they are themselves more than the sum of their past.
Thanks to amber, we can today study insects which are millions of years old. And thanks to the amber of our memory, we can now look back to events in our lives that were as random as that insect trapped in amber.
