If you didn't know what date it was, would that influence what you did or how you felt as you went about living today?
Say you didn't know the name of the month, or the day of the week. Or that you had no way to relate this day—today—to any in the past or any in the future. It's just today.
I suspect you'd feel more buoyant and more free because of it, and that life would seem to have more possibilities. I think you'd feel more optimistic.
Just as one feels lighter and more buoyant after a house gets decluttered, a person might benefit from forgetting the constant framework of passing time that surrounds us: hours, days, months. The subconscious "calendar" function in our brain would be deactivated, dissolving a set of limitations that perhaps hem us in and hold in check our emotions, our imaginations, and maybe much more. Who knows?
Alas, this act of forgetting is not easy to do, with time or with anything else.
My own personal experience in the difficulty of forgetting involves something that happened to me with music.
Consider: Beethoven wrote his 'Pastoral' Symphony No. 6 to depict specific scenes in nature: a babbling brook, bird calls, a storm, and so on. The piece is loaded with musical "tone-painting," and has long been accepted as a masterful example.
Okay, now to Leonard Bernstein. In his book 'The Joy of Music,' Bernstein wrote about the difficultly of listening Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 just as music, with the "Pastoral" removed. Could it even be done? Once you knew Beethoven's 'nature' angle, could you ever not know that, and just hear the music as music?
Bernstein believed it could—that a trained musician could indeed "forget" Beethoven's nature program and just regard the symphony as "absolute" and abstract music, just like its much more iconic predecessor, the Symphony No. 5, which is full of drama and beauty but tells no specific story and paints no specific scenes.
Why bother? Because, Bernstein wrote, it allows one (either a musician or a listener) to experience a familiar piece of music—a warhorse, really—in a totally fresh and new way. And that can have immense value in keeping a masterwork compelling across the generations, rather than have it sink beneath the weight of familiarity and accepted notions. If you can forget the program, what was once a warhorse is remade entirely. It can be heard fresh!
The notes haven't changed. Just your attitude has—because you've forgotten something about it.
I know this is true because it actually happened to me with this very piece of music. As a teenager who was into classical music (yes, it was a rough adolescence), I remember tuning into a Boston Symphony Orchesta radio broadcast from Tanglewood one summer. The concert had started and I didn't know what piece was being played, but it held my attention immediately. I was transfixed: it sounded familiar, like something out of the standard classical "Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven" era, but was also altogether different.
It was slow, and didn't seem to have a melody. Instead, it was more of a texture. The music ambled along, filled with graceful clarinet arpeggios and trilling woodwinds and not seeming to have any forward motion, but with one remarkable passage following another.
The music ended, and I was going crazy. What was it? When the next movement began, I recognized the piece right away. I had played the "second half" of Beethoven's 'Pastoral' many times (for the exciting storm sequence), but had never paid attention to what I thought would be the "boring" slow movement. Now I had just heard it, and with no idea what it was, and I thought it was great!
In this case, I hadn't forgotten anything. Instead, I just hadn't yet learned. But still, I was able to experience for real what Bernstein was talking about: the power of forgetting.
Which takes us back to the question of the calendar. How much of what we see and experience and feel about today is linked to our all-to-human awareness of it being Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013? A specific day with a specific number, related as such to all days before and all days to come. A framework that was in place before we were born and will live on after we're gone. Kinda smothering, in a way.
Does this knowledge in limit us? If we could somehow forget the day, the month, the year, would that allow us to be more fully in the moment right now? Would being able to disconnect from the calendar be like a housecleaning or decluttering of sorts, and result in us feeling more buoyant and light and full of possibility?
I think there's something there. And anyway, if the act of 'forgetting' is good for our soul, then I'm way ahead of a lot of folks just with what keeps happening with my car keys.
