Take a break and deep breath

I seem to get more absent-minded every year.

I was going to get the Christmas decorations out and begin decorating for the holiday. The first thing I retrieved was the nativity set. I unearthed it from its hiding place then put it somewhere that I wouldn’t forget where it was until I got back to it. I draped the garland over the porch and jammed the metal Santa into the mostly frozen ground. I picked up the trash out of the yard before I went back into the house. I completely forgot about the nativity..

It took me a week to find the little blue boxes sheltering the figurines.

Some days are like that. I intend to start something, then get distracted and put whatever I’m working on aside, determined to get right back to it. By the time I find it again, I’m in the middle of another project or two.

The end table I usually set the nativity up on is within reach of our pagan cat. I assume she is pagan, or maybe heathen because she has a grudge against the nativity. She thinks the pieces belong on the floor and if they break when she sweeps them off the table, well, all the better.

My late father-in-law left his nativity set up all year. Occasionally, another figure would join the tableau. The extras were mostly animals, but not always. I miss him.

A friend who lives in Washington now has four wise men in her nativity set instead of the usual three. It seems one of her pets broke one of the wise men. She replaced it. Twice. One can never have too many wise men.

It could be that what I call absent-minded is really a way of sorting out what is important and what isn’t. The problem is that I concentrate on what is least important rather than the other way around. My brother, Michael, stopped by yesterday. We got to talking about Grandma’s house. We could both recall the red rocking chair that sat by the stove. That was where Grandpa sat. I commandeered the space after he died. Even though Grandpa died several years before Michael was born, he “remembers” that chair. 

What does it matter? The short answer is that it doesn’t. So why would I remember the rocking chair and not what I wanted to get at the grocery store?

I have no idea.

Absent-minded or not, I need to get the nativity set up, the wreaths all hung, and shopping taken care of plus any of a hundred other things on my list. I never used to  make lists for anything. Now I can’t do without them. The best thing about a list is the feeling of accomplishment when something gets crossed off. 

I think we are all a bit absent-minded these days. If we aren’t doing several things at once we feel inadequate. We have over scheduled our lives so much that there isn’t a lot of room for down time. The holidays are even more demanding. We heap expectations on ourselves and feel inadequate when we only cross one or two things off our full page lists.

Perhaps being absent-minded is the brain’s way of telling us to slow down a bit and concentrate on now instead of the future. We all need to take a break and just breathe. But first, I have a nativity to set up before I lose it again.