Sometimes I'll watch or listen to media featuring someone describing something that happened to them when they were younger, like "when I was seven years old I went out camping with my father" or "When I was 12 my mom let me drive the family car in a parking lot."
For a lot of my life, this form of recollecting was foreign to me. Not because I never did anything, but because the moments of my life have never seemed to register like that. Sometimes I might remember that a thing happened, broadly, but the details like how old I was at the time might be lost to me.
Over the last couple years, I've read a lot about awareness, and mindfulness, and have gained a deep appreciation not just for what it means to be aware, to be mindful, but also what a lack of awareness is. Thich Nhat Hanh, a prolific Buddhist philosopher, describes one of the primary functions of life, as to foster awareness, and to resist, to fight against forgetfulness.
This lack of connection to the moments of my own life, this is forgetfulness. This is the dissolution of my own self, even as my body continues.
The most insidious and confounding aspect of forgetfulness, is that when you are fully immersed in it, born into a forgetful family, surrounded by forgetful people, the idea of mindfulness, awareness, presence, it doesn't mean anything. Without the example of someone living mindfully, with presence and awareness, the idea of being present, mindful, and aware, is meaningless. It is a null idea.
Some of us seek to forget. Maybe that is what a person needs in a particular time and place to continue on.
I believe that the path to improvement is through remembering, and that forgetfulness is the root of destruction of mind and self, and it is through building up our minds and ourselves through remembering and experiencing every moment as fully as possible that we can build a better future.
We gain wisdom by looking deeply into suffering, even our own.
