“Where Did I Put My Glasses?”
It’s that item you misplaced yesterday, for the third time this week. Those words that are on the tip of your tongue, but turn out to dissipate as effervescently as champagne bubbles. The people you meet on the street whose names you know as well as your own, but for some reason you find yourself drawing a blank.
Sound familiar? Maybe, like me, you’re one of the many people concerned about becoming increasingly forgetful with age. I live in a household of six people aged between 60 and 70, so every act of “dis-remembering” is amplified.
Of course, being forgetful is perfectly human and not necessarily related to growing old. If you’ve raised teenagers, you know they can be the worst, frequently forgetting keys, phones, and various bits of school uniforms. Pregnant women, too, often report high levels of absent-mindedness that carry over into the postpartum period.
Nonetheless, the phrase “senior moments” has a certain resonance.
I’ve been thinking about the topic of forgetfulness as I’ve recently lost, forgotten or misplaced a number of important possessions. Before I lost my iPhone permanently* last week, I misplaced it. I was distracted while unloading the dishwasher, didn’t finish the job and somehow placed my phone, which I’d been holding in my hand, in with the clean dishes and closed the door.
The good news is that I had my phone switched on so it was possible to hear it ringing. The bad news is that a dishwasher, as it turns out, is almost soundproof, and it took a long time to discover the phone’s hiding place.
Rather than regale you the whole sad saga of recent losses and misplacements – reading glasses feature prominently – let me tell you what I learnt from these experiences.
I learnt that it’s completely unhelpful to focus too much on all the things that I mislay or lose. I noticed that I was cataloguing each incident, virtually keeping a mental tally of each incident of forgetfulness.
I’ve decided to stop doing that. I’m not going to try to diagnose my mental acuity – or lack of it – by putting my behaviour under the microscope. Instead, I am going to treat each of these events as an isolated instance of not being mindful. That is something that is within my power to control.
I’m going to dial up my attention – to focus more on the thing I’m doing while I’m doing it. I’m going to accept that the more we try to cram into our lives, the less attention we have to give. I’m going to try and be more present – and I’m going to try really hard not to put my phone in the dishwasher again.
Any takers?
* I’m hoping that my phone may still turn up, although I believe I lost it at the beach, in which case, it could be in a watery grave.
Eve Grzybowski has been teaching yoga for 40 years. She lives on the mid-north coast of NSW and blogs at eveyoga.com
Words_ Eve Grzybowski
Photos_ Jon Tyson/UnSplash