In Absentia

I said yesterday that I’d started a to-do list. I actually did one of the five things I’d written on it – clear and clean the kitchen table. I also did other things related to that which I hadn’t written on the list – like putting away (or rather, dumping in the study) the toys the grandkids had out last week (not just the ones on the kitchen table, but also the ones in the front room); cleaning the sink, draining board and surrounding counters; pulling bags of yarn out of the Chinese cabinet looking for something to use for the border of the baby blanket I’m making for my daughter’s ex-sister-in-law’s second baby (and hence Flick’s cousin) who was born last week (because I need to use all the yarn I have for the blanket itself or else it will be unbalanced because I only had four balls of the original and have had to do a band of a different colour in the middle, and don’t want to go back and start again given that the baby’s already arrived).

I started wondering how much of my time in an average day is taken up with looking for things, often things I’ve only mislaid in the previous five minutes. My first instinct was that it’s probably between about one and two hours. That might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m sure it’s never less than half an hour, and that is balanced out by days when I might spend several hours on trying to find one particular thing. More than once I’ve had kind people (who presumably think I’m incapable of thinking this out for myself) suggest that I have specific places for things like my glasses, phone, keys, wallet, hand bag, coat etc etc etc so I always know where to look for them. I then watch their expressions go from helpful to sceptical as I point out that the problem doesn’t arise at the point when I’m looking for whatever it is – when my mind and concentration is focussed on finding and I do indeed go straight to those ‘specific places’, before starting to figure out exactly where it is this time – but at the point when I put it down, when my mind is NOT concentrating on what I’m doing, but probably on what I’m going to do next; or what needs doing and what I should be doing next; or what I’m going to cook for dinner and when I need to start that; or what somebody said to me earlier or last year; or what I should have said or done in response but didn’t; or what I’ll say next time; or just generally (in that lovely phrase) ‘away with the fairies’.

To use another lovely phrase, I am ‘absent-minded’, and most of the time my mind is completely absent from whatever and wherever I need it to be in that moment, and this, I suppose, is the root of all my difficulties.