Remember that....

Forget It!

“A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”

Elbert Hubbard

I constantly tell people I am “noun challenged.” I will be in mid-sentence, and the thing or person I want to name is simply not available. They've dropped from my mind like a torpedo. It's the most annoying part of aging. I can see it, know it, taste it, but for the life of me, I cannot name it. Then about ten minutes, or ten days, later it will pop uninvited into my mind. The experts say this has to do with processing speed, which slows as we age. I, however, think it has to do with over-crowded conditions in the brain—there's only so much storage space and sixty-plus years of life crammed into it. It takes a while to sort through all that classified information. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

I make up little games to help me remember names—like places I've lived, song lines, historical references. It's pretty sad. I once was married to a man who had a photographic memory—if he had read it, it was embedded in his gray matter. He could still quote those painful lines from the Ancient Mariner that we were forced to memorize in tenth grade. I barely quoted them then. I wonder how he's faring in his sixties; he has many more nouns to lose than I.

I think too that as we age, there's a lot to forget, and our brains help us do that. We mellow out, as all those “drama pathways” that were once so active in our brains fade away, or are, perhaps, sweetly knitted together. Whatever the process, the things that could send us into a sceaming rage in our youth just seem like child's play in our later years. We have seen that any human being can be a monster or an angel, and then turn around and be just the opposite. We have watched ourselves go through that transformation, too, so we understand what can drive a person. There's no mistake we haven't made, so we are not surprised when others make them. We roll with it. Forget it. That's just part of life. It's the good part of forgetfulness.

Remembering and forgetting—there's something to be said for both, but I surely would like to have my nouns back.

                                            In the Spirit,

                                                Jane