It’s such a weird dichotomy, but it seems to be true. At the same time that our brains record every single thing that happens to us, everything sense, everything we’re told, everything we learn or imagine, we forget it and focus on what we deem relevant in the moment. We don’t focus on the furniture we use other than when something is wrong with it. Lumpy seat, not stable and needs to be shimmed with a book, weird stains that need to be covered with blankets, that kind of thing. Otherwise we just recognize them as chair, couch, table, bed, etc. Their uniqueness is not important to our daily lives each and ever second because we have other things to focus on.
We focus on what we are doing, on the regrets we have about the past, on the events we want or don’t want to have occur in the future, and that pretty much takes up all of our time even more so today with being connected electronically. When laws get enacted to prevent us from talking on the phone while driving because we just don’t have enough bandwidth to drive and talk at the same time, and it seems that we default to paying attention to the talking rather than the driving, we have found the boundary of how much we can attend to at any given moment.
So it is no wonder that we forget what we knew when we were children. We forget that there is more to the world than what the 5 senses can detect. There are more ways of communicating than through verbal sounds. There are more ways of understanding things than through the brain. Because it’s not predictable, logical, quantifiable or reliable to use our other senses. It takes time and a quiet mind and by the time we reach adulthood we have neither. So we forget that we were able to see kingdoms in the grass, that the ants had names, that butterflies came from another realm altogether and that in the water were spirits that told us secrets no one else knew. So we’ve forgotten more than we have ever really known. But what if we could get that knowing back?