Forgetfulness plagues us all. At least from time to time, everyone forgets things. We forget things on our shopping lists, we forget the places where things are located on grocery store shelves, and sometimes we forget where we parked our cars in those massive shopping mall parking lots. Forgetfulness comes to us easily. It’s a natural thing. Sometimes we can forget two or more of these things during one visit to the grocery store. When we forget these things [as long as our spouse doesn’t make a big deal out of it] we rather quickly write off our forgetful experiences.
On the other hand, if someone steals that last open parking space we have been zeroing in on then we will have a tough time forgetting their ignorance, rudeness, and self-centeredness.
Most of us can quickly forget and forgive the grocery store people after they pick such good hiding places for the most-important things on our grocery lists. However, many of us will not treat grocery store parking-space thieves so kindly. At the very least, we will ruminate about their ignorance, rudeness and self-centeredness. At most, we will fight the parking-space thieves until one of us is dead. Between these two extremes we will retell the stories of parking-space thievery to our relatives, friends and coworkers until we have exhausted our inability to forget. When we finally let go of such tough-to-forget incidents they will leave no vacancies in our minds because other ignorant, rude and self-centered people will fill the voids by bringing other unforgettable experiences to us.
Sometimes we really struggle to forget things, especially the negative experiences brought to us by others.
Our minds exhibit curious abilities, including:
- our minds are quick to blame others for our negative experiences and
- our minds hold onto negatives and are fully receptive to upgrading negative content by adding fresh, unforgettable negative memories.
These are symptoms of our unforgettable-negatives mindsets. These are weaknesses. These are bad habits.
With persistent work, the bad habit of unforgettable-negatives mindsets can be corrected.
All we need to do is understand and believe forgetfulness comes to us easily and upon that foundation build the good habit of looking our 'unforgettable experiences' in the eye and persistently bidding them, “Adieu”.