It's easy to forget things. People do it all the time. They lose their car keys or their slippers, and they forget their anniversaries or friends' birthdays. It's a commonplace occurrence. We also all forget who we are on a fairly regular basis. This has to be true, as otherwise how could so many awful things be done, if not by people who've forgotten who they are? It may sound like a nonsensical piece of gibberish, but it has a meaning. I'm always forgetting that - please move some things to make space for the gigantic ego, please - I'm actually pretty good at maths and a nice, gentle person. This self-knowledge just leaves for no apparent reason, and with it a large portion of self-esteem wanders into the woods for a five mile hike, hopefully not to be eaten by a bear or a ravenous hermit. Good grief, on a good day, I'm even a decent writer! What might it mean for other people to forget more important things about themselves, and lose their own identities in the process?
One of the greatest perils of modern life is that no-one has any time to think any more, unless they consciously make the time. Maybe no-one ever thought in the old days, either, and this is just a modern myth, this idea that we're constantly connected and never alone. If it's a myth, it's one that feels pretty real. The Internet, for all its advantages, does have disadvantages. Everything has disadvantages. All bathroom things, for example, seem designed to fall over and be constantly unstable. Peeling oranges can make your fingernails yellow. Microwaves spit out gamma radiation. Good things come to an end. Letters take a long time to reach their destination. The Internet's great disadvantage, this week, is that under its constant bombardment of current information we lose touch with some of our constant self-knowledge. Knowledge and information are not the same things, after all. Reading a book is far better for your own stability and self-awareness than reading a forum or a terrible blog post.
(Go read books, you terrible blog readers!)
It's strange to remember that, for example, you're good at things, especially after a long period of time. Relearning large swathes of mathematics to tutor someone else is like uncovering a treasure trove of self-confidence after having it beaten out by the rigours of a doctorate. Egads, there was a time when I was top of the class, and not just a humble code jockey, punching programs into a computer. How odd it all seems. There were different times, and those experiences aren't invalidated by what happened later. Both eras are equally true. For a supposedly intelligent species, we don't seem to use our ability to hold mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously much, do we? There wouldn't be religious wars, if we could.
It's also good to remember to be happy. Tomorrow, or Tuesday, I'll write about 'The Electric Horseman', a film of which I had never heard, but which turned out to be lovely on today's viewing. It's nice to feel happy. One of the great powers of books, television, classical music and film is that ability to unleash the emotions and thoughts that remain dormant within all of us far too much of the time. Hey, who has time to be happy when there's this pile of work to be done, a commute home still to take, and a pile of laundry waiting to be folded after dinner? Who has time to feel anything? Too many people don't even have the time to sleep, let alone think or feel. It's a wonder that people don't forget their own names and addresses!
Yes, things get forgotten, and sometimes they're very important things. We can only hope that they are only mislaid and not lost forever.
O.
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