There are some questions in life to which we will never really know, or understand, the answers. We real women hate that. We like to be in control, know why things happen, and have everything move smoothly. We can learn to live with not knowing some of the big answers, like the meaning of life, the reason for loss, or why we’ll never be happy with our weight. But it’s those little things that drive us batty. It would be easy to say the answers lie in a simple truth of sheer laziness. But I really don’t think that’s quite right. It seems to be more an inability to take just one more step. Let’s look at a few examples.
- The empty paper towel roll, and it’s cousin, the empty toilet paper roll. Someone used the last piece, the last square, pulling it free of the tube center. And there it sits, in all of its cardboard nakedness, waiting to be noticed, which will happen when the next person comes along in desperate need of the squares that aren’t there. Why was a new roll, which is stored nearby, not put into service right away? No answer. Just a missed step.
- A sink full of dishes. Not the pile that appears immediately following a big meal – there’s a reason for those. But what of the random bits that show up magically during the course of the day, gathering as if they are having a small dirty dish party? There they hang out, celebrating the fact that for some reason they were not placed inside the dark depths of the dishwasher which is less than 24” away. Are they being trained to jump into the washer by themselves? History would show this is not a successful mission. Next step abandoned. Don’t know why.
- A dropped item left where it fell. This could be anything from an item of dirty laundry dropped in the middle of a floor, an item knocked off a retail shelf, or food spilled in the microwave. It is like the item instantly becomes invisible to the dropper, or the effort to bend over and correct the issue seems insurmountable. Or maybe It is a scientific experiment to see if gravity could truly be reversed. A misstep.
- Empty nip bottle litter. They are everywhere, scattered like plastic seeds that will never germinate, or left in a heap along the roadside. SO many unanswered questions here. Why are they there? Are they all being tossed out a car window? And by who? Teens participating in underage partying? Alcoholics hiding the evidence on the way home? And why always
nip sizes? If one is going to drink 10 nips, wouldn’t buying a full size bottle be more economical? And why is it almost always Fireball? And most irritating of all, why litter? Can’t the responsible person toss them into a paper bag in the back seat until they get near a trash can? Epically failed step. - Abandoned shopping carts. Just this evening I pulled into a lot at a local market and sure enough, there’s an empty cart hanging out straddling the line between two parking spaces, just one row away from the cart return. Forlornly waiting for a gust of wind so it can gain its own power to go bumping into parked vehicles. This annoys me almost as much as the discarded nips. The person who used that cart had likely just walked all the way around and through the store, then to their car. Were those last few steps just too much to make? Quite literally, steps not taken.
We spend most of our time taking extra steps to pick up after others, to keep life rolling along the way we like it to roll. And that’s the issue. Some choose to follow a different course, move along a different path, and take different (or fewer) steps. We just need to let it go. If we can’t fix it of course. My husband and I have a saying we use with each other: “I’m not a control freak, but let me show you how to do that.”
I guess us non-control freaks should stop looking for answers where there aren’t any. Or hoping for extra steps.
When I was a young girl, I liked to watch reruns of The Jetsons with my brother. At the time, the space-age futuristic inventions and contraptions fascinated me and seemed impossibly cool. I thought they could never happen. While I watched flying cars, a conveyor belt George rode on to get dressed in the morning, and Rosie, the robot maid, I thought life would be so much easier with these nifty innovations.
There is a new robot at my local Stop & Shop supermarket. It roams the aisles, beeping, apparently looking for spills and hazards in the aisles. It will supposedly eventually be upgraded to be able to check inventory and place orders for missing product, but it can’t do that yet. I have no idea if it has a name. My name for it is Useless. The other day I rounded the corner to aisle 7 and there it was, stopped in the middle of the aisle. Its lights had changed from blue to blinking white. It announced, over and over again, in both English and Spanish “Caution, hazard detected.” Whenever this metal beast detects a perceived threat like spilled produce, not only does it repeat that phrase, but it automatically starts an announcement in the store PA system to say “Clean up needed in Aisle 7.” I looked down the aisle, and the only issue I saw was one cereal box that was on the floor leaning up against the bottom shelf. I picked it up and put it back on the shelf, and like an idiot, started talking to the robot. “It’s ok, you can shut up now and keep going.” But of course, that doesn’t work. A store employee must come to the robot and push appropriate buttons to reset it and send it on its way.
I was fortunate to take a mini-vacation this past week. Four and a half days of fun, sun, sand and surf in Florida. It was lovely and restorative. I could use this post to go on a diatribe about how too many of us don’t take enough time off to refresh and reboot, and how important it is to occasionally unwind. But I’ll hold off until I’m successful in taking my own advice and manage to take any further days off in coming months.
We all know that food memories are surprisingly strong. The smell of something cooking can transport us to a past moment in time. A mention of an ingredient can make us remember a special meal at a great restaurant, and we can all probably name our top three favorite foods from our childhood. (For me, that would be fluffernutter sandwiches, chicken in a basket, and chocolate covered graham crackers)
At the risk of sounding like a Debbie Downer and having many of you avoid reading this full post (but I hope you will hang in here with me), I’m going to state the obvious: Death, rather unfortunately, is an inevitable part of life. No matter how you slice it, it is going to happen. None of us will live forever. But we all want to live as long as possible, and even more so, we want those we love to live for as long as possible right alongside us.
During my usual morning routine today, with my brain running through my classic million or so worries, ponderings and plannings, I paused to flip open a lovely little book given to me by one of my RW BFFs last year: The Promise of a New Day by Karen Casey. Today’s WOW (Words of Wisdom) was an entry about living in present moments. “We love to fantasize about the past and the future… But we get into trouble when we forget that “the past” and “the future” are inventions; the only reality is the present. Yes, past events contribute to our now; yes, the present will help to determine the future. But we can’t do anything about them; the past and the future are out of our reach.” Appropriately enough, this caused my muddled head to pause a moment and say “huh.”
It is just over a week until Christmas. Like most R.W.’s, I’ve been hurtling towards the big day on Warp 10 Overdrive for several weeks. I haven’t had any available time to write, and for someone who finds sanity in words, that’s not a good thing. But here I am, spending several hours on a Sunday evening on a plane (more about that in a moment), with some forced sit and breath time, and it is making me consider what a wacky time of year this can be, and allowing me some time at the keyboard. I feel my heart rate calming already. It’s funny how such a magical, lovely season can be so filled with stress and exhaustion. Every year many of us RW’s vow that “next year will be different” that we “will simplify”, we will “start prepping earlier” and have “more relax time.” Hee hee, we make me giggle.
We all know that a woman’s brain is wired like a super highway system with dangerous corners and intersections, where the minimum speed limit is somewhere around 90mph. We are supposed to have off-ramps and rest stops that allow us to do that re-fueling thing called sleep. But most of us seem to have a challenge with taking those exits successfully on a regular basis – even if we manage to get off the highway, we somehow mess up and hop right back on again.
“Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.” – Erma Bombeck
I don’t pay much attention to celebrity gossip. I’m pretty clueless as to who’s married to who, who’s divorcing who, who’s in rehab, who’s in trouble with the law… mostly because for the large part, I just don’t care. Big life events in my friends’ and family’s lives, those I care about. But “news” about people I’ll never meet who live starkly different lives than all of us Real Women? I have no desire to keep track. I have enough to worry about in my own life. I don’t wish ill-will on any of them, and I have a few celeb’s I’d call my favorites, and even fewer who I think seem to be cool, fairly normal people I’d like to have dinner with. But most often, when some hot celeb topic makes the newscasts, or the covers of the magazines in the check-out line, I find myself saying “why am I supposed to care about this?”
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