Forgetfulness

is the mercy we extend to ourselves when we wish to preserve and protect what is precious

Photo: © David Whyte

Forgetfulness

is the mercy we extend to ourselves when we wish to preserve and protect what is precious. Forgetfulness is the gossamer web we weave around something we hid for safekeeping, so that it cannot be found by the world, but more importantly, so that it is safe from our own destructive hands. Forgetfulness is what we use to cover our heartbreak.

Forgetfulness is the web of self-enchantment woven by the mind so that it can continually assert its own false independence from the body, that with all its aches and pains, its vulnerabilities, and its longings absolutely refuses to let go of its belief in its own memory and its faithfulness to everything it has ever experienced. Forgetfulness is disbelief in our own unerring and foundational belief.

Forgetfulness helps us to get far away from a body that would gladly walk through its own despair and heartbreak rather than follow the abstracts of someone else’s success. Forgetfulness grants us insulation and the illusion that we can live without anguish, without care, without the helplessness of a real, demonstrated love. Once we are forgetful, forgetful is how we want everything and everyone to be, so that that the forgetful world can share our own false surface state of happiness, and stop reminding us so terribly, of the very thing we hid from our own sight.

Forgetfulness is also the merciful measure of our distance from what must be remembered. Forgetfulness always tells us where the treasure is buried. What we want to forget or are trying to forget, and the very way we are trying to forget, is also the very way-sign, pointing us to the place we must go to remember.

Forgetfulness is the inverse state by which we come to understand that although we experienced something, we did not experience it with the full vulnerability to which it called us, that although we understood something we never understood the way it broke our heart so entirely and so thoroughly, that although we loved, we did not express that love in the way that was called for. Forgetfulness tells us that although some wound was delivered, and delivered decisively by an unknown blade, we could not allow ourselves to feel the depth to which it penetrated.

Forgetfulness, standing in the empty room wondering why we entered it and what indeed we entered it for, is the disguised urge to return to another room we left but never returned to: the holy precincts of the body that hold what the unanchored mind could never comprehend: the raw vulnerability of our primary, bodily experience and the life that it calls us to. Forgetfulness is the entirely understandable wish to let go of and forget what never should be forgotten.

-from Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words