In a person’s day to day life, there are hundreds of events taking place on a daily basis. So many ‘things’ are happening, inside the body, in thought and mind, in the world around us and on it goes. Much of it is just ‘stuff’ and has no qualitative usefulness or value to our benefit. This is true in modern times more than ever before in human history. So it serves us no gift to save every bit of it to memory. It seems that we aren’t even designed to do so. Maybe because there is no real need to when it comes to the bigger picture of our lives. We typically look at forgetting things as some kind of “inability to remember”. With negative connotations always attached. But lately I’ve been flipping the leaf. Reflecting on it as a natural clean-up process. Erasing and deleting stuff as some form of mental maintenance. “The ability to forget”. Viewing it as a positive function, feature or attribute of ours. Also considering the filters that we use to determine what gets recorded and preserved, versus what gets discarded. Some things never make it pass the save filters to begin with. In the ethereal memory banks, on paper, or set in stone. Some things are filtered-out unwillingly and forgotten by accident. Some things are filtered-in intentionally and forgotten on purpose. You can flip that one so many different ways, right?

We document things to compensate for our natural ability to forget. To erase, purge or miss things in our life experience. As humans, it’s what we do. Think about it. On a globally recognized level, commonly accepted by nearly everyone, we have libraries, museums, maps, and more. In the world of business, we have blueprints, annual sales receipts, company policies and procedures, etc. Documents for days baby! In all phases of technology, we’ve generated equipment schematics, signal flow diagrams, and blah, blah. In sports, we have national and world records, single game highlights and complete career statistics in the archives. In our personal lives, you’ll find uncountable numbers of family photo albums, poem collections, diaries, recipes and on it goes. We save letters, clothing, trinkets and anything else that has significance to us. The human culture has always been based on chronicling and record keeping. Every law, court case, hospital visit, school appearance and grade you’ve ever received is likely saved somewhere. Kinda creepy if you ask me. But for what reasons? And why are we forgetting in the first place?

Consider, if it wasn’t for our nature to forget, we may not have been inspired to bring great expressions of our creativity, genius and growth into the world. Like an abstract mural or a beautiful monument created in memory of something or someone valuable to us. Sometimes the honoree or the memorable event has only a personal significance to one or a few people, but the expression it inspires can have a positive impact on millions for years to come. The amazing things we come up with to preserve the memory and legacy of something. Our so-called faulty forgetful minds can’t be trusted to handle it for us, right? But maybe it wasn’t meant to. That’s what makes you do what you do!

We also accumulate and produce a lot of junk and better off forgotten lore in the process. In my humble opinion, much of what gets saved in the physical world (as structures, engravings or valuable objects) may be quite valuable or critical to some, but it usually proves to be a subjective value only. And if you ask me, a ton of what’s preserved on paper, physical and digital, is a subjective waste of fine oxygenating trees and hard drive space respectively. But again, such a claim on what is truly worth committing to memory and why it should be, is often a subjective one. And my opinions are no exception to that. It can and will be argued or debated from day til night.

I starting thinking about the more fundamental reasons and benefits behind all the record keepings. Of course we’re all clear on some of the obvious ones. How else could we teach and pass down what we’ve learned so far? How would we show proof of discoveries and re-live timeless moments of great historical events? And then there’s that worthy-of-being-chronicled-super-great-thing-that-we-did; or that ultra-cool-guinness-rare-record we broke; that gives us a bop’em sock full of bragging rights as long as it’s on the books! Definitely couldn’t leave that out. 🙂 With the obvious aside, and the subjective reasons considered, something more universally fundamental rings true. It’s not that complicated. We simply do it because we have to! We need to do it in order to keep conscious about happenings, events and formulas that we would have otherwise forgotten about in a hundred different ways over the countless decades of this over-stimulated, event-filled human experience.

Time to relax and let it pass. It is quite unnecessary and highly impractical to care about or remember all of it in any given case. Much of the constant back pedaling and past dwelling may be working against our universal progress. Now when we document wisely, These records give our lives meaning and value. On paper or in the minds eye, they help to drive us forward in honor of the past, with inspiration of knowing what more we can be because of it.

And speaking of the mind’s eye, the brain is constantly engaged in its own internal version of this same phenomenon. Excessively documenting things, committing selective and random stuff to memory non-stop. Do we really know why? I mean, let’s be straight up here. Much of what our brains retain was not consciously selected by us for memory preservation. So can we even begin to know exactly why we saved it? We didn’t even do it on purpose half the time. Or so it seems. The same applies to what gets forgotten, or what never gets committed to memory in the first place. So many filters.

Well it often takes time to think on these things. Give it some thoughts as you experience your day and share them in the comments. I know I got something stewing up there. 🙂