Remember to Forget

  This past day went by extremely quickly, yet I felt anxious for various reasons. The first is that I was going back to my department today after a relatively long absence working in a different department. Adjusting back to the old routine felt strange to me, and I wasn't sure if I even had work to "return to" after the absence. The second anxiety was over the several meetings that would take place in the coming week, many of which would detract me from my routine work again. It's funny how, at the point when I was going through today's meetings and engagements, I somehow managed to forget how demanding or anxiety-provoking it is. In immersing myself in what needs doing, I was not dwelling on the cares of the future that originally made me feel anxious.
   Something else happens in these situations as well. In the process of going through something that makes me anxious, I start to lose attachment to the things which I had been trying to "use" to shield myself from anxiety. This is a very important point to me, because once those "emotional shields" aren't necessary anymore, a kind of burden is lifted from me. It's as though I had forgotten that I even needed to defend myself against the situation I wanted to avoid, and I am not spending so much energy in trying to escape from the painful experience.
   Can mindfulness include both elements of "remembering" and "forgetting"? It seems that the literature in mindfulness tends to focus on the former, but I have a sense that mindfulness also requires the ability to forget, or to lose the sense of clinging to an old or outdated storyline. Doing this sometimes requires moments of "just doing" and letting go of the anxiety around it.