Forget: Don't Remember
By Edward Bok
MEN have made fortunes teaching the human race how to memorize and how to remember. But a greater fortune awaits the man who will teach humanity how to forget. A good memory is excellent, when it is cultivated to remember the right things. But what many of us need to learn is how to forget the unpleasant things, the things that irritate and drag down the health of the mind and of the body. We do not realize how much our health depends upon the art of forgetting. We nurse a grievance until it makes us angry and bitter; we hug to our minds a fancied wrong until it becomes a real one. A word, an action — in the majority of cases misunderstood — rankles in our bosom, and we let it linger there until it fairly eats our vitality. If all this did us any good, — if it undid the wrong, actual or fancied,— there might be some excuse for our doing it. But all it actually does is to sap us mentally and physically. “Easily said,” says some one, “but how can you forget?” Simply by cultivating the habit of switching your mind off to some happy memory the moment some disagreeable thought enters into it; by forgetting the faults of your friends and keeping strictly in mind their good qualities; by believing not in the worst side of people, but in their best; by letting go and not hanging on to the little jealousies, the petty annoyances, the disappointments, the rankling acts — the little gnats that eat into our very souls and minds and bodies. Just to forget — that is what we need as much as how to remember. It is not easy. No; nothing that is worth while is easy. But the mind can be trained to forget what it is best for it to forget, just as well as it can be cultivated to remember what it is wise for it to remember. To learn to forget, to practise it, to make a study of it — that is what we need! — Edward Bok.