creation of thoughts

What determines attraction? What prompts or incites a connection, a desire, a need for a specific thing? Whether a person, an object, or knowledge of a specific field, my greatest interests all develop organically, without any conscious effort or decision on my part. If asked, I can at most give reasons why others should like it or why it's interesting as a general topic; why I specifically feel drawn to it, however, is much less clear. For example...

Home
I love the West Coast, specifically the Northwest. Conscious reasons for this could be that it's where I grew up and although I would rather eat a pinecone than go snowshoeing, I love looking out my window and seeing the mountains. I like the fact that no one here is held back by rain and that the one time a year it snows everyone becomes a little kid again.

(Of course, not everyone's inner child is an idiot like this weirdo.)

I like the knowledge that if I go to the very western edge of my state, I will be looking out not to more of what I am comfortable in but to the Pacific Ocean, across which lie languages I don't yet know, customs I am as of yet unfamiliar with, and places I have not yet seen.

I love all of this about Washington but none of this explains the fact that when I come back to the West Coast - no matter where on the West Coast - I feel more at home than anywhere else in the country. And yet none of these places carry a real sense of home. Why is that? What is it that turns someplace into one's home instead of just where one lives?

Career
As I sit here, less than three months away from receiving a masters in Japan Studies and faced with the very real possibility of entering a Japanese company in the fall, I find myself thinking more and more about how I got into this field. Whether it is wooing me by flowing naturally or torturing me in its reminders of how far I have yet to go in my study of Japanese, I adore studying Japanese. There are many days when I'm reading articles for class that I actually feel giddy, much like a little girl holding hands with the boy she likes. Despite this heady feeling, however, when asked why I started studying the language, all I am able to answer is なんとなく興味を持つようになった. But merely saying "I somehow and for some unknown reason developed an interest" seems at best insufficient.

Examples exist throughout the major aspects of my life, from the personal to the professional to the intellectual to...and the list goes on. Does not knowing the impetus make the desire or interest less viable? Are consciously created desires more powerful or more lasting than the unconscious ones? How are interests created?

I bring up these questions as an aspect of memory and how memories are created. Our interests, our passions, our thought processes...these all play pivotal roles in the creation of memory and its subsequent manipulations and recreations. I believe that what we choose to remember, whether consciously or not, is decided by the same forces that decide our interests and that the relationship between ones desires and ones memories is one of symbiosis.

For those at all interested in the topic of memory, I recommend the following:
* Feather in the Storm: one woman's recollection of growing up in a family of intellectuals during Mao's Cultural Revolution

* After Life: Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of my favorite directors (other works include 幻 [Maboroshi], 誰も知らない [Nobody Knows], and 花よりもなほ [Hana Yori Mo Naho - no English title]), this is one of my favorite movies. Coming from a background as a journalist, Kore-eda devotes the majority of the film to interviews with his characters regarding what memory they would like to take with them into the afterlife.
An interesting note about this movie: while the characters who are featured throughout the movie are professional actors, the majority of the people interviewed in the beginning are just random people.


Responses are welcome.