To forget how to forget

We can forget so many things. I don’t know why. So many things I wanna keep in mind, but I simply can’t. Why is it like that? What is working wrong with my short-term and long-term memory? Why is it easy for someone to remember something that I can’t? Or I can remember something that she can’t?

The brain is a big mystery. It can do so many things, and is so complex. With the computer we try to copy it in a way. To come close to it, with saving things. Nowadays when people wanna know more about the brain, especially young people, they try to explain it the other way round. So they use the computer and tell them, based on that, how the brain works.

But unlike us, the computer forgets nothing. Even the internet remembers everything. The brain is not like that. So many things we forget. But is the information really lost, or can we just not remember? Some things will never be ‘transported’ from the short-term into the long-term memory. Some things we just saw, but never paid any attention on. It might will come back once as part of our dream but then we just can’t remember to remember it. I mean when we see something like a person in our dream, we can be sure that we have seen him or her before in our real life because our brain is not able to create new persons, or surroundings.

our brain is like a net with lots of connections

So we can remember even things we can’t remember. That’s the miracle of our brain. We can forget everything, except how to forget. That’s what will be different between our brain and the computer. We can forget, but never forget how to forget things, and we can remember things we don’t remember.

Be strong

When you're in your darkest hour and all of the lights just fade away. When you're like a single flower whose colors have turned to shades of grey, well hang on and be strong.

Some years ago I thought that cancer is the end of life and only older people can get it. Now, I know, that it’s not true. One of my fave singers, the australian Delta Goodrem, got cancer when she was 19. That is a very young age. I was totally shocked after I read about it. She’s not much older than I am, maybe that’s why I was concerned with her even more. My grandpa died because of cancer, as well as my grandma. So I thought that this disease will certainly cause death.

But Delta fought and she believed and she won. She is still alive and healthy again. She said in an interview that this experience had changed her and her life completely. She appreciates everything even more than before, she goes to the doctor’s regularly, doesn’t drink that much and if she does, not in large quantities.

In December 2010 a German boy named Samuel Koch was on the German TV show “Wetten, dass..?” (which means “bet that”). The show is one of the most popular and successful shows in Germany, in which everyone can bet whatever he/she wants and prove it on the show. His bet was to jump with special jumping stilts over a car, that was moving towards him. Never had anything happened, he did it several times, but on the show he fell over the car and was lying on the floor afterwards. His father was the driver and so probably more shocked than if he would have ‘only’ watched this accident.

Now Koch can’t move, he is paraplegic since then. In an interview some weeks ago, he told that it wasn’t the accident but the surgeries after the accident which caused that he now needs help for everything. He said that in life, no matter what you do, you could never be certain that nothing at all will happen to you. You could stay at home and you can fall from a ladder. You could cross a street and a car hit you. Sometimes you have to risk something.

He now needs help for even the simplest things like brushing his teeth, putting his clothes on or eating something. Things that are normally for us to be done without anyone’s help. For him this is even harder because he always did some sports, and now he's unable to move. He can only move this head, but that's not that easy. He wrote a book about what happened and that this all changed his life completely. He is only 24 - so in my age, that’s why I feel so much more with him.

It doesn’t depend on your age, when and if you get a disease. He still prays every day, believes in God. He often ponders and asks himself why God chose him, that this happened to him. But Koch is not mad in any way, he never stopped believing in a miracle. Goodrem is the perfect proof that such miracles can come true. Her faith helped her to defeat cancer. In her song “Be strong” she sings about it. I still hope for Samuel Koch that he will have such a miracle, too, that he will do the best with his life, because nothing that will happen to someone, makes this life worthless. Keep praying, keep believing, never give up and be strong.