pee here now
Several years ago, I switched health insurance companies and my new insurer sent a uniformed nurse with short black hair to my home to do a health assessment. We sat at my kitchen table and she asked questions off the cuff about my health history.
“Diabetes?” she asked her, as if accusing me of illicit drug use.
“I did not answer.
“Cancer?” Nope.
“High blood pressure?” Nope.
When he had completed the questionnaire, he reached into a portable metal box and pulled out a white plastic cup. “The last thing I’ll need is a urine sample,” she said, sliding the cup toward me across the wooden table.
I took the mug into my bathroom, set it on the white tile counter, unbuttoned my jeans, sat down, and quickly started thinking of something else. Many long seconds later, I stood up, zipped my jeans back up, and, still deep in thought, looked down to find the empty Styrofoam cup waiting on the tiled counter.
My consciousness raced back to the present. The cup!! How could I forget to fill the cup?! I picked it up and held it at eye level. The glass seemed larger somehow, and infinitely impossible to fill, like a gigantic “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” movie prop. I took it down again and considered my options.
You could fill the cup with water and “stumble” on your way out of the bathroom. You could make up an excuse related to dehydration or bladder shyness. I could sneak in through the narrow window above the bathtub and flee to the airport.
Realizing that neither of these schemes would work, I finally had to admit to the nurse that I had forgotten why I had gone to the bathroom. “I can drink a lot of water and try again in a few minutes,” I offered.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing the empty mug and dropping it into its metal case. “I’ll be back tomorrow. I have nothing better to do.”
I would like to report that this was an aberrant bout of distraction, something that could be attributed to cold medicine or a fight with my mother. But the fact is I tend to forget. Much. And it’s getting worse.
In the past few months, I’ve left my bag in two Mexican restaurants, a coffee shop, a friend’s car trunk, and a department store dressing room. Two weeks ago, I removed a nozzle from my garden hose and spent the latter part of that afternoon trying, in vain, to figure out where I had placed it.
The part that scares me is that in the last few months I have also been going to a Zen Center in an effort to practice meditation and mindfulness. One of my goals has been to become less forgetful by being more present. Or, to paraphrase a popular Buddhist saying, “To urinate here now.”
But even I have forgotten things at the Zen Center, like the time I lost my bag before an important ceremony and had nothing to contribute to the fight against world hunger.
The increasing bouts of distractibility had been worrying me, and friends’ jokes about early Alzheimer’s were starting to get less funny. But last week I got some valuable insight into distraction when I completed an assessment called the Gregore Style Delineator.
This assessment groups people into four types based on how they value certain words. The word “alive”, for example, seemed more attractive to me than “rational”. I liked the word “spontaneous” better than “problem solver”.
When the results of my word ratings were tabulated, I was shown to be a distinct “abstract randomizer,” whose negative characteristics include a propensity for “flyability” and a lack of attention to detail that often earns them the title of … and me. I’m quoting directly from the review: “an unusual flake.”
However, reviewing the evaluation, I learned that there are several good reasons why Abstract Randoms (“A-Rs” for short) seem so fickle. For starters, and I’m just bragging a bit here, ARs have vivid imaginations, a tremendous ability to absorb and relate seemingly unrelated facts, and often divert their attention only to what has personal meaning. (A cup of urine? I don’t think so.)
Also, ARs rarely work in a sterile office with a tidy desk. Instead, and I plead guilty, an AR’s office is located in whatever coffee shop he’s working at. His filing cabinet is on his head.
Needless to say, I found these results reassuring. As a journalist, I am paid to find connections between people and the events around them. Therefore, I have to spend time reflecting on life and what it means, and sometimes the best time to reflect is when I am doing some other pointless task. So what if I forget a bag in the process?
All of this has made me think of something I learned in a novel writing class, and that is that a character’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness.
It’s certainly true of me, but it’s also true of many people: the brilliant doctor who focuses so intently on healing a patient’s body that he refuses to comfort his soul; the quick-thinking marketing genius who is hugely intolerant of people who don’t “get it” as quickly as he does. Even Einstein, from what I heard, couldn’t remember his own address or phone number.
The point I’m trying to make, and I’m not at all defensive about this, is that no one is strong in all facets of human behavior. Some of us are good with people, others with data; some are logical, others reactive; some pay attention, others… what were we talking about? Regardless, chances are the better you are at one end of the spectrum, the worse you are at the other. How many visual artists do you know who could run an accounting firm?
Instead of judging a person’s weaknesses, wouldn’t it be nicer to acknowledge their strengths and offer to take them to the restaurant where they left their car keys the night before? I think so.
Copyright, 2005, Shari Caudron.