Friday, January 6, 2012

It'll turn up......

I had a really good topic for today, but I've forgotten what it was.

My best thinking is done in my car, my moving meditation device. So I bought one of those hand-held recorders to keep in the console right next to me. That way, as I wended my way through traffic, enjoying the tailgater behind me immensely and a thought struck me (at least a different one than what I was screaming at the tailgater), I could whisk that device out and record enough to jog my memory later.

Then the recorder got lost in my car.

I also lost all the tiny tapes, one by one, after I took them out of the machine, carefully labelled them, and put them.....somewhere.

The most maddening part of this phenomenon is that I can search, and search, and search for some errant item and then finally give up. Only to find it later, sitting in plain sight where I had just been looking.

This is so common that I have a "one size fits all" catch phrase for this: It'll turn up.  And it usually does. So, I stop looking, turn my attention elsewhere, and sure enough, it turns up.

If you're waiting for me to explain this, you can go read something else. I don't have a clue.

But my personal favorite experience is when I forget what I'm saying right in the middle of saying it. How does that happen?

Talk about embarrasing, especially if it occurs in the middle of a business meeting. You're on a roll, supporting your plan or your viewpoint or whatever is on the table at the time, and for no reason at all, your entire train of thought vanishes! Poof! Your mouth even may still be moving from the word before, and then your mind literally becomes a blank slate, empty, while your lips struggle to form whatever word WAS going to be there just a second before.

It's as if your mind develops holes in it, like the sieve you use in the kitchen. Instantaneously. With no warning, everything that was just there leaks out, and you're left with.....nothing. A deserted warehouse.

There is so much that is wonderful about getting older, aging gracefully in a society that is youth-obsessed.

This isn't one of them.


“The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

4 comments:

  1. According to Quantum Physics the vacuum of space is not truly empty, therefore non-existant particles pop into and out of existance. These are called Virtual Particles. "Something from nothing," we might call it. Although scientists say, this is not possible at the macro-level, where humans live, I'm convinced this is the only rational explanation, for what you describe; be it objects or our thoughts. When I find something I've looked for in a place I know I checked 2 or 3 times, this is the only logical explanation!

    I believe it was Sherlock Holmes who said, "Once you have eliminated all other logical possibilities, what remains is the only logical answer." My Physics skills are minimal and my quote of Holmes is more a paraphrase, but I'm sticking with that explanation as my FINAL ANSWER. Now, what was I going to say next? It seems to have disappeared into the vacuum of space. Hmmm????

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  2. God, you're great! You have described my life this last year to a 'T'

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  3. Thanks, Caryn....now, what were we talking about?? :)

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