TheBanyanTree: Living with myself

[JMoney]

Every year my husband gets himself a new pocket diary.  He uses it.  For as
long as I've known him he has kept records and made notes to himself in his
little pocket diary.

About three years ago he gave me a purse sized Filofax so that I also could
keep records and make notes.  Possession of this item has taught me that I
am extremely bad at such orderliness.  The final proof of this is currently
nestled in a pocket of the purse in which I used to carry the Filofax until
I became irked by the weight of it - a set of diary pages for 2003, still in
its plastic wrapper.

Around the same time my husband also gave me a mobile phone.  I used it
once, just to try it out, and then the whole business of recharging
batteries, replacing sim cards, trying to read the tiny buttons and figure
out which ones, and in which order, to press became altogether too much work
on top of everything else I was trying to learn how to do at the time.  It
also added considerably to the weight of my purse.  So now it lies quietly
where it has lain for the last two years - in the drawer immediately to the
left of where I am now sitting.

For some time I felt ashamed of my diary-keeping and mobile phone-using
failures but in attempting to understand why I manage these things so poorly
I have come to recognise that I simply don't want to be burdened by them.  I
like new things, challenges and spontaneity, not schedules and routines.  I
like solitude and large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to concentrate
on whatever new thing I'm doing.

Intrusions startle me.  In fact my startle response is so marked that my
husband finds it rather amusing.   I leap.  My arms come up.  I cry out
involuntarily.  My heart pounds.  He grins.  I feel like punching him right
in the middle of his nice, warm, furry belly but settle for giving him a
very severe look.

My mother also has a fairly dramatic startle response.  As a younger,
blither and more careless person I used to find her antics quite amusing.
She'd be concentrating on, say, a crossword puzzle and I would, say, call
out, "Mum!".  She'd jump out of her chair, eyes wide and wild, crying,
"What?  What?  What?".

Maybe what goes around really does come around but whether it does or not
one thing I think is true.  There must be a familial, and therefore
physiological, component to the degree of startle a person exhibits in any
given situation.  And there's probably something similar going on in
relation to the desire to keep hard copy records of things and maintain
routines.  Therefore these attributes are not necessarily failings but could
be abilities - or maybe disabilities, depending on one's point of view.

So it's not a matter for shame.  It's just something one must accept and
work around as necessary.  I manage to remember most important dates and
have not been seriously inconvenienced by having forgotten others.  Of
course this testimony needs to be balanced by the admission that I do rely
quite heavily on my husband to remind me of less important things.  Indeed,
my youngest son declared that when Paul is away, "everything goes to crap".
He says this because I forgot to take him to a driving course that had been
scheduled at his school one weekend.  But I fail to see why I should be
blamed for forgetting something important to him that even he didn't
remember.

Meanwhile, if I need a phone when I'm away from home either I can find a
public one or I'll be stuck, and then I'll just hope for the kindness of
strangers and see what happens next.  That's how I got to see the reception
area of the Northern Lands Council building the evening our car's computer
chip died.  It was interesting to go inside after having driven past it so
many times.  The man I asked for help was very nice even though he was
knocking off and in a hurry, I only got a few sandfly bites while waiting at
the side of the road for the AANT man to show up and it was pleasant just
sitting and looking at the world for the hour or so that the waiting took.

Janice