The Luxury of Forgetting

December 8, 2005

In school, forgetting is a bad thing. It means you don’t remember: what you’ve learned, what you were supposed to do, your lunch . . . it means something went wrong. Being something of an obsessive compulsive student, I’ve always thought forgetting was the worst thing.

But in this season of waiting and preparing, I’ve been thinking of forgetting as a luxury. A luxury like most other luxuries, one that comes at the expense of something else or someone else, but a luxury just the same.

We stayed at a night shelter the other night. It was an incredible experience. One of the guys taught us card tricks, others just chatted, but they were so friendly and so accommodating of us, who knew so little about what to do and what was going on. And while it was hard to get so little sleep, the hardest part by far was watching the men leave at 5:30 in the morning. Watching them walk through the doors into the cold, dark morning, knowing most of them had no particular place to go, knowing most of them would be back that very night. It broke my heart. I felt so helpless and so frustrated.

But I went home, and I crawled into my bed and I slept and I ate and I went to classes and I went to work and I bought food at the grocery store and in the midst of it all, I forgot. I forgot how cold it was outside. I forgot that there were people with no place to go and no job to employ them. And when seven o’clock rolled around I forgot that most of those men were lined up outside the door of the shelter once more. Less than 24 hours after something broke my heart, I had managed to forget it – not forever, but for long enough. And I realized one of the luxuries of my life is the ability to forget – about the cold, and those without jobs, and those with no place to stay, even at night.

I’ve been realizing how much of a luxury forgetting can be, not only with regard to big things, like homelessness, but with regard to little things too. Listening to a friend live through heartache and change and uncertainty, I felt like I was living their pain, but then we hung up the phone and I went back to theology reading and for a few moments, I forgot about how hard their life is, when I know they can’t forget.

The lives we live and the worlds we inhabit are often too much with us, and so perhaps the luxury of forgetting other’s pain and hard times is a necessary luxury so we can continue to function. But sometimes it feels like remembering and bearing witness are the only things I can do in the face of that which breaks my heart and so to forget feels like failure and I wonder what to do with that . . .

Posted in life, religion by Sarah