Sanity is a triumph (day 127)

We apparently forget most of our day when we go to sleep.  Only the most salient parts remain and even they are blurred into prior similar experiences.  I've probably written about this in another blog post, in fact.  I have a vague notion that I have but it's blurred enough that I'll assume it's acceptable to write about it again because presumably the memory will also be blurry in my reader's minds.   How voluntary that nightly amnesia+blurring might be is, I suppose, a matter of definition.  It is my being that is doing the forgetting after all.  If I wanted to keep something in memory presumably I would and could take the necessary steps (all systems operating within normal parameters, assumed).  

The forgetting that is annoying is more the short term forgetting.  The distracted attention that comes from multiple threads competing for attention combined with lack of sleep, and...age.  Yes age.  I'm 38 and I think I can say this without eliciting laughs of derision from baby boomers.  But who knows.  In any case, I notice the difference...I think.  The problem is that I don't have a clear memory of how my mind functioned when I was in my 20s.  I remember not keeping a calendar because I could remember all my appointments in my head.  But that may have been because I didn't have that many appointments and no one scheduled an appointment weeks in advance.  I remember new facts being easy to remember.  I kept all phone numbers in my head.  Perhaps the most telltale sign of decline though is that I don't remember being anxious about forgetting at all.

But rather than think of it as a decline I choose to look at it as a triumph of organization.  It is rather miraculous that sanity prevails in most of us given the accumulation of experiences and knowledge and the relentless progression of time.  Think of the network and partitions needed to make all that (potentially contradictory) information stay together, and still allow you to utter things like "I need to do the dishes".   Marvelous.  The fact that I sometimes forget little things is forgiven in a flash of admiration.

But for those that are still worried, the NY Times says we can look for contrarians to keep our brains nimble.  And I don't think they mean 2 years olds, though in my experience toddlers are a great source of brain scrambling experiences.

A song for this post.