No, really, where is it?

I know it’s here somewhere…

Not on the kitchen counter or the stove; peeked in the living room and not there either. Oh wait, bet I put it in the fridge without thinking. Nope. Well, where the heck is it?!

I have the experience of feeling like my head is spinning 360°. Then I notice what my left hand is clutching - my lost water bottle. Oh, thank heavens, that’s where it is! Relief and fear, simultaneously. Relief, that, at last, I know where my water bottle is. Fear, that, well, you can guess, dementia is ensuing.

Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not the only one who has these experiences, especially in my age range (over 39 for those who remember Jack Benny.) Yes, there’s the water bottle, AND my glasses, AND my iPhone (oh please, NOT my iPhone!) I’ve even considered buying the new Apple AirTags, digital doohickeys placed on objects to help you locate them. As Apple states, “You lose your knack for losing things.”

Let me reframe Apple’s pitch, “You lose your knack for having a memory at all.” Case in point. I used to have a large capacity for remembering phone numbers; they just tumbled from my memory - bloop, bloop, bloop.  But with the ONSET of cell phone contact lists (OMG, it sounds like a disease, doesn’t it?), my memory for phone numbers has almost totally disappeared. Just let iPhone do it! Oh, and GPS, this gift from the cell phone gods has dulled my internal instincts for navigating while driving. I know I’m in trouble when I automatically turn on my iPhone navigation even when I know my way home.

Ceding my capacity for being mindful…to the digital gods? STOP! No digital object-finding doohickeys for me (at least for the time being.) The starting point for my loss of mind(fulness) is rushing and multitasking (no longer a gift of mine.) My loss of mind(fulness) also leads to the aforementioned “lost” water bottle, iPhone, glasses, and whatever else was just in my hand that I’d planned to use again in 60 seconds…

AND my loss of mind(fulness) also leads to panicking.

Hmmm, am I being hard on myself? Probably. It’s highly unlikely I’ll be 25 again at my next birthday, replete with the vast expanse of memory synapses I possessed at that age. NOW, I need to be strategic. Strategic?? Bluntly, using what I’ve got. And, what I’ve got is the knowledge that I panic when I’ve misplaced something. Oh, heavens, how I HATE panicking! I really, really hate panicking! But the memory of how much I hate to panic is often a good deterrent to forgetting where I put something. Ta dah!

Who would have ever thought that the fear of panicking would be such a wonderful tool for promoting memory retention? Not me, but I’ll take it!

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