We now have a well-established body of literature that tells us how to avoid forgetting, train the brain to remember, and prevent the forgetfulness that comes with aging. But are we sure it's always worth remembering? And sometimes, to avoid wasting time, health, and human relationships, wouldn't it be just the opposite: force ourselves to forget? Let's start with health: the very brain we care so much about needs hygiene, frequent cleaning, to avoid losing clarity, freeing it of information, sensations, and judgments that pile up like a cellar we never tidy up. The brain we always want to be attentive to our commands, neuroscientists warn us, needs to forget in order to learn, an activity for which, quite simply, it's never too late. If it's too clogged with memories, then there's no room for new knowledge, and if there's no new knowledge, we're wasting not only useful knowledge but also new human relationships.
Forgetting is the most useful and extraordinary natural antidote to feelings that have in common the fact of being counterproductive, as spoiled as the air they produce in our heads: rancor, resentment, anger, intolerance.
And only through an attempt at forgetfulness can we reach one of the peaks of human generosity: the forgivenessThink for a moment about the plight of elderly people who have lost their short-term memory but still retain their long-term memory. Faced with their uncertainties, we feel tenderness and pity: but don't we also think about how fortunate they are to forget pain, ingratitude, and suffering? Isn't there something clearer in their gaze, which is actually fading? Yet, in the age of performance anxiety, we are pressured to always strengthen our memory.
Forgetting is useful, much more often than we can imagine. The philosopher wrote: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Blessed are the forgetful, for they will overcome even their own mistakes.". Here, then, is a first advantage of forgetfulness. It allows you, with one fell swoop, not to dwell on the mistakes you've made, to move forward, to don't sit around and mull over the ifs and buts, and not to lose touch with reality by remaining suffocated by feelings of guilt or by the banal, and useless, remorse.
When we manage not to remain stuck on a memory, and we usually do so with the most unpleasant ones, and to not overcome the wound we have suffered, there is a very serious risk of adding up a series of wastes. Fueling anger, rancor, resentment: all very human but useless things, which do not bear any fruit, but only spread the poison with which we isolate ourselves, distance ourselves from others, and slip into the various circles of solitudeWithout wanting to, we are wasting important parts of our lives.
Forgetting also means making room for new things, not always keeping your head turned backwards, not remaining trapped in the presenteeism (lives that always flow the same in an eternal present), to imagine that the future could be decidedly better than what refuses to emerge from our memory box. Only by forgetting can we approach the delicate and fragile universe of forgiveness, a category that sooner or later we always have to deal with in life.
If therefore we remember it's important, for a series of even obvious reasons, the same is true for forgetting, except for the pleasure of memory, of experiences, of what we have seen and done, of who we have met, loved and sometimes hated.
Every day our brain is subjected to an intense activity of accumulation of materialNews, information, emotions, decisions. All together. And all this stuff circulates so quickly, it makes us feel awkward. In this case, forgetfulness, another advantage, becomes a form of mental hygiene, a form of head cleansing, like a hot bath at the end of the day. And it even takes a little exercise, a method, to become forgetful when needed. A friend who spends all day meeting people at work, holding meetings, listening to problems and looking for solutions, confessed this method to me. forgetful so as not to get lost in the swamp of the excess of things to remember: reset the brain after each meeting, trying to forget useless things and retaining in memory the useful if not indispensable ones.
This method also has a scientific basis. The researchers ofUniversity of Glasgow they made one study on the benefits of forgetfulness and have demonstrated its usefulness, for example, in making clearer and more effective decisions, in being more lucid and therefore more decisive.
Help in forgetting comes through the identity card. As we age, the memory In the short term, it fades, and the long-term outlook remains on the horizon, perhaps strengthened. It's a law of life, of the passing years. We easily forget We lose the name of someone we know well, we constantly misplace things, we need to write down our appointments to remember them. Then there's a moment, that of old age, when we even forget what we just ate, but we remember our childhood perfectly.
Old age almost brings to to equate forgetfulness with ataraxia, the end of anxiety, agitation, constant stress. And the entrance into a quiet life, serene, even pain-free. But it is precisely the elderly's telescopic memory, the gentle use they make of it, that should lead us to reflect on the usefulness of forgetfulness and the fact that we should not waste it.
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