The Quiet Cost of Letting Go

Move

I have become noticeably forgetful. Names escape me—authors whose work I respect, details I once recalled easily, even the names of my cousins’ children. In conversations, I pause, search, and sometimes fail. When my daughter noticed it, her reaction was immediate. Her eyes widened in disbelief: How can you forget that?

My first response was justification. I attributed it to the accident. A medical explanation felt necessary—both to reassure her and to protect myself from the implication that something was “wrong.”

See

On closer observation, the forgetfulness does not feel like confusion or decline. It feels selective.

What is slipping away are labels, references, stored identifiers. What remains intact—perhaps even sharper—is awareness: noticing inner shifts, sensing agitation early, catching reactions before they turn into behavior.

The mind appears less invested in holding names, less attached to retrieval. This contrasts with the usual assumption that clarity equals recall. Yet clarity, in experience, is showing up elsewhere.

This raises a quiet question: whether what is being lost is memory—or attachment to memory.

Reflect

I hesitate to call this realization, but it feels adjacent to something real.

If identity loosens, the mind may naturally stop gripping what once propped it up—credentials, references, associations. Forgetfulness then is not failure, but reallocation.

I am not dismissing physiological causes. They may be present. But the deeper point is this: something essential has not weakened. It has become more available.

Perhaps true realization does not sharpen everything.

Perhaps it simplifies.

What remains is not the ability to recall names on demand, but the ability to be present without effort. That trade-off is unsettling—but it may also be a sign of movement in the right direction.