Forget remembering, never forget
As far as I could tell, I had been sound asleep. Last night. But can you ever really know? It’s like that DFW short story, about the wife who can’t sleep and blames the husband’s snoring and the husband who suggests the wife was sleeping and so in actuality heard snoring in her dreams, and so they eventually visit a sleep lab to get this sorted out, find out who was the sleeping one, and, well, I won’t ruin the rest for you.
All I remember, and this I recall firmly, was the sudden intrusion of a thought. It stabbed me like a pinprick, sharp as it was thin. These types of inspirations are fleeting; you either feed them with action or they evaporate like a light mist, leaving little trace. I told myself I would write about it tomorrow; I wouldn’t forget it! No. No way. I’ll remember.
I didn’t.
I woke up the next day and went out for my usual sunrise walk, bright smile like an idiot unaware. Unaware of what I was unaware of: that an exciting thought had even woken me up last night.
Later that day, the moment came back to me in a sort of tip-of-your-tongue type way, itching in its insatiability. Part of me thinks I would have been better off forgetting. At least then, like a tree falling in the forest, no one would’ve been around to hear it make a sound. But life is a tease, and I’m trying to learn to live with that.
That is why I’m here. I was, and maybe still am, hoping to unearth the thought by writing about it, or around it. No luck yet.
Instead, it seems to be leading me astray. Writing tends to, let’s say, make me wander. Down passages, through doors, into rose gardens. In particular, not getting out of bed and writing my thought down that night, then, only later, scribbling madly in an effort to remember it made me realize something. I don’t want to remember. What I actually want is to never forget.
Those are not the same thing. They can feel the same, far out in the future, when the mechanism which bore the thought disappears into the background, leaving just some thought, and you, unaware of how it got there.
But remembering is fickle. It is, emotionally and spiritually speaking, empty, sapped of vigor, and dependent on some unknown future action like scouring your memory as you chase an invisible thread. And even if you do find something, you likely chased some phantom thread through memory, the unreliable narrator in your story. It is what I am doing now, remembering, writing about a thought that once contained so much passion and excitement, even if only momentarily, only to arrive here, enervated like a wilted plant ready to deform or blow over at the slightest gust of wind.
Never forgetting is making a mark. It is doing something the moment inspiration strikes, gushing with that restless, fidgety passion that either needs to be killed or unleashed. It is the difference between engraving something into your amygdala and etch-a-sketching a faded transience onto your forebrain.
When inspiration strikes, you need to just go for it. Get your tired ass out of bed and write about that thought. Call the friend you haven’t spoken with in a while for no good reason, even if it feels weird. Go say hi to the girl who catches your attention with that undeniable aura about her. Doing these things instead of thinking about doing them at some future time substantiates them into a solid form. A draft, a conversation, a phone number. Once you’ve substantiated them, you no longer have to remember. If it’s enduring, you will continue with it. If not, well, it’s probably forgettable anyways, but you wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t tried.
Do things you never forget so you never have to remember. You are an evolving experience aggregator, not a contained counterfactual conjurer.
These are the best trades you can make. Trading omission for commission, passivity for agency, future for present.
I want to trade remembering for never forgetting, and in a weird way this is the answer to the question I posed upfront, about whether you can ever really know. Living a life centered on remembering is sleeping, with the hope that somehow you’ll wake up tomorrow, acted upon by an outside force like some fairy sprinkling dust on your eyes. Instead, I want to be awake — truly awake — engaging with life in each intensely present moment with all its jagged passions and mercurial gyrations, fully conscious and alive, never merely sleepwalking through it and only waking up later to search an old dusty attic haunted by the indefatigable ghosts of what-ifs and should'ves.