Commenting on the minuscule pedestrian in the distant street framed by the window, trying to clean a black dot on the linoleum floor, calling out to show me a glamorous Marie Claire ad: looking for clues. Everything is equally interesting and meaningful. Is it living in the present? Is the classification system defective? Unexpectedly I found food for thought in Michel Pollan’s writings:
“…forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation – indeed that is a mental operation, rather than, as I’d always assumed, the breakdown of one. Yet, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But, forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every walking minute would overwhelmed our consciousness if we could not quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember…Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered…If we are to get through the day and get done what needs to be done. Much depends on forgetting.”The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan p.160-162