The captain has just turned off the seatbelt sign.
We’re at cruising altitude, 35,000 feet, soon to be over the ocean. My wife and our two kids are settling in for a ten-hour transatlantic journey. It feels like as good a time as any to start an article about traveling with young kids.
Travelling as a family is hard. All parents know that (and so do the rows ahead, behind, and directly across from them). It’s also expensive, in every currency that matters: money, time, energy, (sanity?). So the question nags: Is it worth it?
By hour seven, when patience runs low and sugar highs run high, parents need to believe it is. That this isn’t just chaos for chaos’s sake. That they’re giving their kids something lasting: a core memory that might shape them into balanced, empathetic, globally-minded humans.
But here’s the uncomfortable possibility: what if they’re wrong?
Skeptics say as much. The argument is often a variation of the following: they won’t remember it anyway, so what’s the point? But that simple objection hides a deeper, more provocative question: can we be shaped, transformed even, by experiences we can’t recall?
Frankly, it’s a miracle we remember anything at all.
Memory depends on the brain’s most delicate architecture: networks of neurons linked by the faintest of electrical impulses. It’s among the most biologically fragile processes we possess, and yet it can preserve moments for nearly a century.
Put in perspective, memory often outlasts flesh and bone and rivals some of the world’s most enduring materials.
Much of what we now understand about memory has come from studying its opposite: the loss and decay that come with age, or with conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Advances in these fields have revealed that memory falls into two broad categories: explicit and implicit.
Explicit memories—also known as declarative memories—are those we can consciously recall and describe. They include episodic memories of personal experiences and specific events (like remembering your 8th birthday party), and semantic memories of general knowledge and facts (like knowing that Paris is the capital of France). These are typically what we mean when we talk about “remembering.”
Implicit memories, or non-declarative memories, are unconscious. They shape our behaviours, emotions, and perceptions without our awareness. One kind is procedural memory, skills and habits like riding a bike or tying shoelaces that we perform without thinking. Another is emotional memory or conditioning, in which emotional responses persist even if we can’t remember their cause. Like feeling uneasy in a place where something frightening once happened. A third form, priming, refers to subtle influences from prior exposure, like hearing a song and feeling nostalgic, without knowing why. These memories operate beneath the surface, but they shape us all the same.
These are the ones we’re most interested in, because they form first in early childhood and often endure longest in old age. Long before a child can tell a story or recall a fact, they can feel safe in a parent’s arms, flinch at a loud noise, or remember how to climb a step. And even as explicit memory fades in conditions like Alzheimer’s, implicit patterns—like walking, playing music, or responding to a loved one’s voice—often remain.
Of course, not every vacation unlocks a child’s deeper self. And not every smell or song lodges itself for life. But the mystery is precisely in not knowing what will last and where it will live.
I’ve seen this up close, living with my grandmother in the final months of her life. Long after her short- and medium-term memory had faded, older, deeper memories began to resurface. She spoke to us in Turkish—a childhood language she hadn’t used in decades—and even remembered the lyrics and melody of a song she had learned in elementary school. It was a song the schoolchildren were taught to sing to a passing Zeppelin (yes, you read that right!) as it floated over the sleepy coastal city where she grew up.
Few stories illustrate the mystery of memory more vividly than that of Clive Wearing. A renowned British musician and conductor, Clive contracted a viral brain infection in the 1980s that devastated his hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for forming new memories. Since then, he has lived in a kind of eternal present, unable to retain new information for more than a few seconds. “He has no past and no future; he is, as it were, stuck in a constantly changing moment,” wrote the incredible author/neurologist Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia.
And yet, not everything was lost. Clive can still play the piano with grace. He still recognises the deep feeling he has for his wife, greeting her every time with the joy of a reunion, even if she’s only left the room for minutes. The scaffolding of memory: dates, names, events is gone. But some essential thread remains: a selfhood that endures beneath the rubble of recall.
Clive is the closest thing we have to proof that our sense of self is more than just the sum of our remembered past. His case reveals a profound distinction: between remembering the events of our lives and remembering the kind of person we are as we live them.
In many ways, Clive embodies the entirely implicit self: all blueprint, no building.
He retains no narrative thread, no continuity of experience, and yet manages to maintain a clear, even evolving, sense of identity.
Remarkably, that identity remained responsive, capable of love, of emotional connection, of musical expression. Clive was, and is, someone, despite remembering almost nothing of what made him that way. In this sense, he is the ultimate traveler: moving through time and place with no journal, no memoirs, and yet emerging transformed and intact all the same.
My kids are finally asleep.
The hardship of an east-to-west transatlantic flight is that you travel during the day, when kids are full of energy. Regrettably, sleep only overtakes them when you’re just hours from your destination. Still, I’ll take the quiet moment. It’s a rare and welcome thing.
Flying still feels magical to me. Something transcendent, without analog on land; a stolen moment of unencumbered time. I look at my kids and imagine: what if they woke from this nap transformed in the way I hope this trip might allow? My youngest remembering herself as more fearless, or warm, or curious. My son seeing himself as cosmopolitan, adventurous, generous. It’s a lot to hope for, but for a moment, in this suspended stillness, it feels entirely possible. If we believe in the hidden beauty of the self, woven mysteriously from implicit memory, why not also believe in its capacity to be reshaped, by foreign lands, new people, unfamiliar places?
The cabin lights flick on with that familiar ding. The captain has turned on the seatbelt sign and we begin our descent. The real world approaches, and with it all the logistical headaches that it brings. But the magic hasn’t worn off just yet.
My kids are still dreaming. And that, for now, is enough.