We strive. We hustle. Grind. Anything to be noticed. Social media has made it entirely possible to become legends in our own lunchtime, and so we chase it. The being seen. The being remembered.
And yet, ironically, most of us are quietly working on the opposite project. We live to be utterly forgettable. Not to the world. To ourselves.
Nowhere does this show up more clearly than in the middle of life, when the first half's momentum runs out and the question of who we actually are comes looking for us.
This is a how-to piece, but not the kind the title promises. Consider it a field guide to how we pull off the forgetting. And how we might stop.
Let's ask James Hollis to set the stage:
"Forgetting that we are summoned by each moment to make life-defining choices is rather easy to do. It is always easy to pull the blanket over our head, fall back asleep and wait for another day, having successfully avoided the responsibility of conscious life."
Ooh. That first line though. Forgetting that we are summoned.
The Greeks, as usual, got there first.
The river you drink from
In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the five rivers of the underworld. When the shades of the dead drink from her waters, they forget everything. Their lives, their loves, their names. Themselves.
But Lethe is more than a river. She is a person, a presence, and her family tree is worth pausing on. In Hesiod's Theogony, Lethe is a daughter of Eris. Strife gives birth to Forgetting.
Look at the birth order too. Eris's firstborn is Ponos, Toil. Then comes Lethe. Then Limos, Famine, and after her the whole grim litany: Pains, Battles, Quarrels, Lies, Ruin. The old poet is telling us something with that sequence. Strain comes first, and oblivion follows close behind it. Forgetting is one of strife's children.
The Greeks then built a word out of her name that we still use, mostly without noticing what it says. Lethe, forgetting, joined to argos, idle, gives us lethargos. Lethargy. The word literally means made idle by forgetting.
I see this in the coaching room more often than you'd think. The person who arrives not in crisis but in flatness. Usually somewhere past forty. Nothing is wrong, exactly. They just can't feel the point of anything anymore. It feels like laziness and it bothers them, but it's not. It's lethargy doing its quiet work. Somewhere, a battle went unattended, and the forgetting crept in after it. Inner strife leads to outer striving. The laziness isn't towards work. It's towards the soul's deeper calling.
The mythology and the etymology tell the same story our nervous systems do.
The two springs
Here is the part of the old story almost nobody tells.
The mystics of the ancient Greek world, the Orphics, buried their dead with thin gold tablets. Inscribed on them: instructions for the road through the underworld. The instructions warned that you will come to two springs. On the left, the spring of Lethe, where all the other souls crowd to drink. Do not drink there. Hold out. Further along, guarded by a white cypress, is a second spring. Mnemosyne. Memory.
Drink from Memory, the tablets promised, and you keep yourself. Drink from Forgetting, and you are simply recycled. Sent back around for another lap of the same life, none the wiser.
The Orphics understood something we keep having to relearn. Forgetting is the easy drink, and it is always on offer. The queue is long at that spring. Remembering, staying conscious of the thing you would rather not face, is the harder path. It is also the only one that goes anywhere.
If the first half of life is spent building, the second half begins at exactly this fork. Two springs. The first recycles you back to where the ego feels in control. It's the safer drink. Familiar, certain, well-queued. The second summons you to be yourself. To let go of security and walk past the crowded spring to the one under the white cypress: towards remembering who you are, instead of being recycled into who you've always tried to be.
Back to the blanket
Return to Hollis, this time the last line. Having successfully avoided the responsibility of conscious life.
Maturity calls for being consciously responsible for our lives. We pull the blanket over our heads because we're afraid to face the day. We fall back asleep to our lives because we're anxious about what it asks of us. We tell ourselves "another day, I'll get to it another day" because we feel inadequate to the decision that this very day, this very moment, requires. We kick the can of our lives down the road, straight into midlife, childishly assuming things will always be as they are now.
But midlife asks something more of us. To remember. To be truthful. To be conscious of our lives and our soul's calling.
Every one of those postponements is a sip from the left-hand spring.
So if you're somewhere past the halfway mark, here is the invitation, and the only how-to this piece will honestly offer: stop drinking from the river Lethe. Stop setting yourself up to forget. Notice the blanket moment. That precise instant when something in you says "later". That is the summons Hollis is talking about. You don't have to answer it heroically. You only have to stay awake for it. Name the strife instead of sleeping it off. Take the one small step the moment actually asks for, rather than the grand one you keep postponing. That is drinking from Mnemosyne.
Un-forgetting
One last gift from the Greeks. From lethe they made another word, perhaps their most beautiful one. Take forgetting and put the little prefix of negation in front of it, a-, and you get aletheia. Un-forgetting. Un-hiddenness.
Aletheia is the Greek word for truth.
Truth, to the Greek mind, was not a fact you look up. It was what remains when the forgetting stops. When what was covered (blanketed, we might say) comes back into the light.
And there the irony sits: in trying so hard to be unforgettable to the world, we forget who we truly are.
So let me flip Hollis' quote on its head, this time as an invitation:
"Remember: you are summoned by each moment to make life-defining choices. This is the truth a conscious life calls you towards."
Un-forgettable.
I’m trying to remember this, daily.