Things Go Invisible

Have you ever noticed, or in this case, not noticed how things seem to disappear from your attention after a while? They continue to exist, and be exactly where they have always been, but if someone asked you, you could never remember the details of what they are referring to. For instance, only recently did I actually look at my mouse pad and discover it was a Max Payne mouse pad. I never noticed before, and someone had to explain to me who Max Payne was. I don't know where this mouse pad came from, but it's been mine for quite a while now.

My husband used to have a picture from a coloring book tacked on the wall next to his desk. Our daughter colored it when she was five. It stayed hung up there until probably after she was fifteen. It wasn't that we were so sentimentally attached to this picture. We just stopped seeing it.

Once one of the kids made a piece of "art" and I hung it on my wall. It was just a toilet paper tube on a string. It literally hung there on the family room wall for years! Finally a good friend asked me why I had a toilet paper tube on my wall since forever, and I really didn't know what she was talking about. I looked, and there it was, suddenly visible again.

It can be a dangerous thing to set something down "temporarily". Years later, there it still is, and you still don't know where to put it.

As I reflect on this post, I'm wondering if it says more about my lack of observation, or my lack of housecleaning! Probably both. I can look at a layer of dust for a long time before it bothers me. Same with cobwebs. You can brush them away. They come right back. Almost as fast as finger smudges, unwanted refrigerator magnets (these are different from wanted refrigerator magnets), and clutter on my kitchen counter.

I keep telling myself that someday I won't be so busy, or so tired, or so preoccupied. The truth is that right now I don't feel like fighting the futility of having everything just-so. Someday, just-so will be something I may fuss about, but in the meantime it's easier to just let things fade away into invisibility.