Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the more forgetful you become?
Oh, it doesn’t happen all at once. At first it starts with little things like, say, losing the car keys. Then sometime in your early 30s you progress to occasionally forgetting a name here and there. And then, just when you are thinking how well you are holding up, it finally happens. You leap up the stairs, throw open your closet doors, only to be left staring blankly at your shoe tree trying to remember just what it was that you came upstairs for in the first place.
After that, you begin to think that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t your usual sharp self so you start considering strategies to trigger your memory, like going all of the way back to the place you started out from or asking your cat what you were looking for. However, these solutions will not always work.
“Just make a list,” my friend Lisa suggested the day I forgot to take my son to soccer practice. “Sometimes just the act of writing things down will help you remember.”
Now I’ve always believed that the only types of people who are able to make lists and stick to them are the very same people who wash their windows in the spring and rotate their mattress every six weeks. And you know who you are.
Besides, there’s a certain amount of adventure in not knowing what the day, or in some cases the week, will be like. On top of that, I’ve begun to enjoy the reckless abandon of wandering down grocery store aisles wondering what food I need, and spontaneously tossing items into the cart.
However, I have a feeling that my friend Lisa didn’t spend her morning staring blankly at a shoetree after walking to her closet 16 times from different directions.
So I decided to start making a daily list.
I wrote down each of the tasks that I needed to do: laundry, water the plants, wash the car, take the dog to the vet, return library books, put all of my pictures from the last five years into a photo album. By the time I was finished I instantly felt better organized and more efficient – and mildly depressed at how pathetic my life really is.
But I dutifully carried the list around and marked off completed tasks with a big, red check. After a few hours, it was clear to me why people keep lists: there are few things more enjoyable than writing a big, red check next to a completed chore. Let me tell you, it’s an exhilarating experience.
However by the end of the day, I had only finished two out of six tasks so I transferred the unfinished items onto the list for the next day.
Now, to an avid list maker, this may sound like a good plan, but each day, no matter how hard I tried, I fell farther and farther behind. By the third day, I started to lay awake at night thinking about all of the chores that I needed to do. On the fourth day, the stress caused me to eat a whole pint of chocolate mocha ice cream. During the sixth day, I started biting my nails and a tiny bald spot developed where I had begun pulling on my hair.
By the end of the week I longed to return to my old, chaotic, non-list-making ways, back when I didn’t know about all of the things I needed to do.
So I did what any mature, educated woman would do: I tore up the list.
And, as I tossed the pieces into the air, I vowed that the next time I need to remember something I’d find a more practical solution like writing on my hand with a ball point pen or tying a string around my index finger. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just have to ask the cat.
