Lately, it’s been hard for me to sit quietly and center myself long enough to write well. I’m so distracted. Competing thoughts and worries about the world push away most good story starts. I tell myself it is reasonable to expect my working memory (and executive functioning) to be a little off in an extended pandemic. This brings to mind something small, yet worth sharing, about a clear message sent now and again by my nervous system,
Stop. Just stop.
I was trying to do too much, too fast. On the fifth stop in a series of errands, my credit card fell out of my hand and under the check-out kiosk at CVS. Masked and in a hurry to grab just one more thing before heading home with a carload of perishable groceries roasting in the summer sun, I was a pending disaster. Not used to that kind of pace while paying scant attention, I grabbed my credit card out of my wallet and it flew under the machine, the one bolted to the floor, as though it were a skittish bird. Shocked, I was crawling on my hands and knees, my hair sweeping lightly against the stained carpeting as I searched frantically for what, as it turns out, I would not find. Eight or nine customers stood behind me waiting, refusing to make eye contact or help in any way, huffing and puffing and shifting their weight from one leg to the other, so furious I was holding things up with my silliness while the kiosk wailed in warning,
“Please complete your purchase! Please complete your purchase!”
Oh, I would’ve if I could’ve.
Staff was too busy to help and apparently, the store manager was not in that day. I left my name and phone number on a scrap of register tape with a person who seemed entirely uninterested in my situation. Defeated, I drove the carload of perishables home, put them away, then called the bank to freeze the elusive, flying credit card.
About an hour later I returned to CVS with back-up, a husband determined to locate our shared credit card. Flashlights and cardboard swept below the kiosk produced nothing but an abandoned Burt’s Bees lip balm. The card was just GONE.
We drove home in silence, I canceled the card, ordered a replacement, then spent the afternoon getting back in touch with all associated auto-payments. One day the old card will surface like a bubble in the sea of great annoyances. Or it will not.
This sort of thing happens to me now and again, indicating I should stop whatever it is I’m doing and take a broader inventory of how I’m managing my life. Often I’ll find my spaces are cluttered in tandem with slight errors like a tangled purse or things not put away on counters. I’ve been walking around in a post-pandemic fog, disillusioned the pandemic is not actually 'post'. I should take seriously the setbacks resulting from a year-plus of mostly sheltering in place, compounded by long periods of stress and rising cortisol. We are all carrying a lot and we have been for a very long time. I think it might help to make accommodations, organize a few spaces, and move a little slower. For me, there is a correlation between organization and calm.
Sometimes it helps to have a mental picture to relate to when going through a complicated time. The image I hold for myself these days is of a vintage, wooden, pinball machine. I am the ball. Each day I begin at the top of the angled board, not sure how the day will take shape. I begin to roll and before long, I’m slowed by a series of supports or barriers
(stop, just stop)
and eventually, I make my way to the hole at the bottom as I curl up in my bed at night. I always get to the hole, I just take a different path each day, and never straight down because that would be too fast. I find if I pay attention to what is going on around me and learn from it, and if I’m slowed and corrected periodically, sometimes even coming to a full stop for a moment to take a breath, everything ends up okay. And as John Lennon reminded us, if it is not okay right now, it will be later. We just have to slow down a little bit.
Copyright (2021) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved