Forgetting is what I am good at. This morning I left the house for a copy run. As I closed and locked the door, I realized the item I intended to copy had been forgotten. So I went back into the house to fetch it. At the copy shop, I realized I had also forgotten both the envelope and the stamp. That letter was clearly not destined to go in the mail today. I also forgot to complete and print a second letter that I had also wished to copy and send.
While on the road, I realized that I knew the route intimately. Each hazard, each bad curve, the blind intersections, the bottomless potholes, those places where other drivers always attempt to do stupid things. Those places where I have done stupid things. Because I always drive the same routes, I know exactly what to look for. I anticipate every possible problem. I never drove in this manner before the accident. I would just get in the car and go. Half the time I was thinking of work, or some other issue when driving. The exception was when driving in falling snow, or freezing rain. Under these conditions, as now, all of my attention was dedicated to safe travel.
I do not understand how it is that in one case I am forgetting things, but in the other instance I am totally focused on events. There were past instances of me forgetting where I parked the car. This problem has been resolved by only parking in a select few locations and using the same location for each visit to that specific area of the city.
On the thirty minute walk to my appointment (My selected locations are often distant from my ultimate destination. I prefer the extended walk to a lost car.), I found myself thinking about the workplace performance review I had found. It suggests that I am far from recovering all of my prior skills and abilities. Then I thought about this blog effort, and the fact that I have managed to enter a post each day for the past seven days; this is a significant change from a year ago when it took several days for me to complete one post. This was not immediately visible to the casual reader as I had started drafting potential blog entries two weeks before actually commencing to post.
So, on the way to my appointment, I was reassured by the belief that despite all of my other deficits, my writing skills have improved. On departing the appointment for the long walk back to the car, I realized my optimism was misplaced. Of last weeks seven posts three were “borrowed” from other texts composed during the 2 month blog hiatus. One post was a direct crib from a letter to my lawyer. The fifth was written at night, in bed, while listening to the rain. Once I had the text blocked out in my head, I needed only to come downstairs to fire up the computer and perform the final act of data entry.
By the time I reached the car I was again concerned over the question of improvement. Am I getting better? Or is improvement an illusion, just wishful thinking on my part? I am going to hazard a guess and claim that yes, there has been an improvement. I feel more positive about writing, I have come to enjoy the discipline of it, the demand that it places on me, the requirement that I come to an appreciation of my world, to exercise judgment, to investigate and weigh different conclusions, the fact that I now have an oeuvre (love the fact that I can now deploy language like that) and a written record of all my triumphs and failures.
When I first started blogging, everything was new and difficult, and laborious and awkward. Now the writing is more playful and less of a forced effort. I think that is worth being labelled as an improvement.