The Memory Vault
- Richard Mark Dobson
- Dec 19, 2025
- 6 min read
Introduction
I’ve spent much of my life in motion — first in imagination, later in the world. When I look back now, not through nostalgia but through the lens of the Memory Vault, I can see the pattern clearly.
Escape was never something I ran toward; it was something I grew into.
When I was young, escape meant imagination. Before planes and passports, I traveled by other means — through Tolkien’s pages, in warm winter classrooms where ‘book time’ stories opened doorways into imaginary places, across autumnal and summer fields where birds were teachers and guides.
I can still remember the hush of my primary school as my teacher read The Hobbit, his voice shaping enchanting landscapes in my mind.
That was my first experience of real freedom: the ability to inhabit worlds beyond my reach. Inwardly.
Birds were my first obsession. My Arthur Singer Book of Birds was a portal to far-off lands long before I ever boarded a plane.
Those illustrated birds and feathers, with their otherworldly colours, awakened a kind of ache — a longing not just for elsewhere, but for expansion. To push horizons outward.
Birds were everything I wanted to be: alert, situationally aware, unburdened. Free to fly. Caging them felt — and still feels — like a crime against wonder itself.
As I grew older, my escapes changed form.
Imagination became action.
Daydreams became departures.
Somehow, without ever consciously deciding to, I began keeping track — every flight, every take-off, every landing.
From Flight 001 to Flight 633, I collected the numbers like others collect stamps or medals.
I didn’t know it then, but I was drawing a map of my life — a cartography of motion. A record of moments when I chose the wide world over the narrow path.
That list doesn’t feel like an achievement so much as a testament.
A reminder that I dared. That I moved. That I didn’t let fear or comfort keep me grounded. Each flight is an echo of a decision — to go, to risk, to begin again.
Aerial drift lines across time.
If I could speak to the boy who climbed aboard that first plane, I’d tell him something simple: You were right to dream bigger. You were right to believe the world was yours to explore.
Because he couldn’t have imagined the places I would go — or what those journeys would make of me.
And now I stand in front of the Memory Vault — a life captured in fragments. Not to preserve the past, but to understand it. To shape it into something that can live beyond me.
Letting go is the hardest part. I’m attached to these memories — not because they trap me, but because they remind me of where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and why it mattered. Yet I’m learning that release can be a form of creation.
When a memory is shared, written, shaped — it becomes something larger than nostalgia. It becomes a gift.
The Memory Vault is my way of asking what’s worth carrying forward.
Which stories still breathe. Which fragments speak not just to my life, but to life itself.
It’s not about sentimentality.
It’s about evidence.
Evidence that I lived freely.
That I paid attention.
That I said yes to the world again and again.
I realize now I’ve never really stopped escaping — not from anything, but into something: into imagination, into the world.
And this Vault is not the end of that journey.
It’s another threshold.
A passage.
In the Beginning
One day, in a small English town in the late 1960s, a boy opened a book he had just bought. It was Arthur Singer’s Book of Birds.
It was the illustrations — birds set against tropical rainforest and jungle — that ignited an obsession with the exotic. An early hunger for colour, texture, sound, and difference. A quiet beginning to a lifelong pursuit.
These were the years before screens filled every room. Before the internet. Before Google Earth.
In the greyness of northern England, the young lad studied the decorative plates of birds of paradise. He traced their colours and forms, their iridescent plumage, and in doing so, he travelled — inwardly.
Long before he ever held a camera, he was learning how to see. Shape. Form. Colour. Texture. He understood instinctively that the world could be read visually.
From his small bedroom, he imagined aquamarine seas, the forests of New Guinea, the Amazon basin, the high plateaus of Tibet.
These places existed first in his mind, summoned from pigment and paper.
Knowledge became wonder. Wonder became yearning.
Half a century later, the book remains. Worn. Fading. Fragile. Its power undiminished. Then, it was a seed. Now, it is a reminder: sometimes an entire life begins with a single page.
The Memory Vault
Echoes of youth.
Fragments of dreams, distilled.
The Memory Vault is where those fragments wait — not to be mourned, but to be decoded.
There comes a moment when what lies behind us begins to call.
Not with nostalgia, but with the quiet insistence of unfinished business.
Not asking us to return, but to pay attention.
For a life well lived is one rich in memory — lucid recollections that warm the soul and tickle the mind.
For me, that call has taken form as The Memory Vault.
It is not a shrine to the past, nor a museum of sentiment. It is a working space — a practice. A method of sifting through what remains, not to cling to it, but to understand it. To ask what this life was really about.
Within the Vault lie the raw materials of a life lived in pursuit of freedom — fragments gathered through movement, curiosity, and deliberate living.
The Vault allows the tracing of the long arc between innocence and experience — not to glorify the past, but to study its architecture.
Because the past, when examined honestly, is not a prison.
It is a portal.
Through it, we can see not only where we have been, but what still matters enough to carry forward.
The Memory Vault is not mine alone. It belongs to anyone who has looked back — not to linger, but to learn how to move forward with intention.
In the Beginning, There Were Departures
I think of the ledger kept since 1975. The first entry: Swiss Air & Kenya Airways. London to Johannesburg via Vienna.
That flight feels both immediate and impossibly distant.
Since then, flight after flight has been catalogued in neat columns. Each line a marker of a life in motion.
Flight 1.
Flight 5.
Flight 12.
Flight 63.
Flight 112.
Flight 457.
Flight 635 .
A map of excitement and anticipation. Of pursuit.
Each flight is more than a journey between airports.
Each is a meditation on departure and arrival. Life is measured not only in departures, but in returns — moments when we come home, even if home is a storage unit, a bookshelf, or the glow of a slide held up to the light.
They are acts of participation. Conscious, deliberate engagement with the world.
The shutter’s horizontal lines echo the vertical ink of the ledger.
Stasis and motion.
The Vault holds what has already flown; the ledger counts journeys still unfolding.
Inside, what emerges is not nostalgia, but calibration.
These objects are kept not for sentiment, but as evidence — of choice, of attention, of a life negotiated against predictability.
The Vault asks universal questions:
What is worth keeping? What must be discarded? What remains when life is stripped to essentials? And how do we leave evidence of a life lived freely?
This is not hoarding.
This is reflection.
The Vault is a theatre of attention. Each object a performer, waiting to speak.
Freedom is never pure. Every journey carries its shadow. Within the Vault are echoes — signals returning from past choices. The Vault teaches how to read them.
This is not a shrine.
It is a practice.
A reminder that freedom is shaped, not granted. That attention is cultivated. And that art and life are inseparable — if one chooses them to be.
A quiet realization settles in. A life of forward motion has been built. But the next journey is inward.
The Vault is opened not to retrieve, but to release.
Freedom and memory are not opposites.
They are partners.
Every flight required letting something go.Every photograph was a way of keeping something close.
The Memory Vault is the reconciliation of those two gestures.
This is not a return to the past.
It is the first flight inward.
Destination unknown.
The Tension — To Keep or To Let Go
Every object here demands acknowledgement — even if only once, even if for the last time.
Do I preserve it? Digitise it? Release it?
The archive waits not to be admired, but to be understood.
The next journey is creative.
Spiritual.
Interior.
For fifty years, I’ve flown across the world.
The next departure begins here — between shelves and shutter lines.
In the long-delayed take-off of memory itself.
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