Is It Better to Forget?

Awhile ago, my sister’s Facebook status read, “Wishes that it could be easier to forget.” I know she's been trying to move past some difficult things in her life. And it got me thinking. Would it really be better if we could forget? I think it’s safe to say that we usually want to forget bad, scary, or painful things. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I’m tempted to try to forget even happy things, because they’re tainted with loss or associated with things that didn’t turn out well. Maybe that’s the challenge of forgetting? The web of the mind is so complex that to forget one painful thing sometimes means to forget a series of happy things. Wouldn’t it be better to just take each moment for what it is? I know that’s my challenge.

And then there’s the whole “knowing the bitter to recognize and appreciate the good” argument. And I think after you experience this, you can’t deny it's true. How would I know what makes me happy now if I didn’t remember what hurt me in the past? How would I know what to teach my daughter to avoid if I hadn’t learned the hard way why to avoid it?

If I could really have my way, I’d remember for my own sake, but make everybody else forget. Like the time I accidentally knocked my phone off the hook on speaker in my quiet cubicle farm of an office, meanwhile cursing the idiot who didn’t realize the dial tone was blaring to the whole office for five minutes straight (a stack of papers on my desk pushing the receiver off the base of the phone was to blame, but it took someone finally coming around to every cube in search of the culprit to point out that it was actually MY phone). Yeah, pretty sure I’d like everyone to forget about that one. Or the time I fell off stage face-first with rear end in the air in very minimal costume in front of an audience of my peers. I’d like to remember these experiences so I NEVER repeat them. But I think I’d like everyone else’s brains to be clouded.

And maybe they are…how often do we really remember other people's embarrassing moments? Maybe once in a while, but I think the majority of our cringe-inducing memories feel worse inside our head. 

I'm a sucker for a good quote (at least one I can Google in five minutes). Here are a few on this topic that I thought had some value:

"Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting." -Joyce Appleby

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long." -Pablo Neruda

"Take without forgetting, and give without remembering." -Bryant H. McGill

"Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering." -Paulo Coelho

Ideally, we would do what it takes to look for the good in every situation—even if that good is just a lesson learned—and forget the rest. Easier said than done, I think. Sometimes it feels like we might never forget pain, hurt, heartbreak. Our challenges become part of who we are and in that way, I guess, actually help to shape our future. And when you really think about it, that's one of God’s greatest gifts to us.