When was the last time you were truly and absolutely in
the NOW? Every toddler worth his salt
can spend an age staring intently at a busy ant, just as every teenager wallows
completely in his own immediate space and time, giving the occasional nod to
his amazingly bright, prosperous and successful future. When did we lose the ability to focus on and
embrace exactly where we are, at that very minute?
Is there an age for this, like losing teeth and
hair? Or does it accompany overstretched
mental resources and the bane of busy women everywhere – just too much to do,
to remember and to cope with, leaving our brains to fizz along like those
demented scented bath bombs rocketing around the bath?
I’m plumping for brains bursting with filling like overstuffed
armchairs. Have you noticed when you
move house just how much has collected since the last move? Bet you never observed it accumulating in the
shadows as you returned from yet another weekly successful shopping mall
expedition, shoulders bowed under the weight of those bulging bags.
Yet, like those unwelcome love handles,
creeping around our middles, most of what we hunt down and gather at the
emporia remains inside our homes, to our surprise and often despair when we
need to “pak ons goed en trek”, (pack our stuff and move). Yes, the goods entrance is virtually a one
way street.
Oddly, the plethora of information flung at us daily via
a thousand sources has the same habit – it clings stubbornly inside our brains,
hiding away in nooks and crannies and trying hard not to be found when
needed. We have a super storage system
with a major flaw – the indexed filing cabinet is locked, making knowledge
retrieval difficult. The older we get,
the more information is glued inside groaning brain cells making recall on
demand even harder.
Which makes life extremely taxing for middle aged wives
and mothers. Not only do we suck up
global news, regional news and local news, of which there is so much, this
deluge joins the information we need to get ourselves out to work, ensure the
family is clothed and fed, the house and garden spic and span, things are
repaired and in working order, we are in a reasonably presentable state of
dress and grooming and the pesky monthly accounts are paid on time.
And, we also hoover up the needs of children and husbands
who don’t fill their heads with any of this, to them, useless
intelligence. Why care about what time
you need to be ready, when Mum will do that for you? Why worry about what to eat, when you can
just walk in the door and ask what’s for dinner? Bob Thaves was right when he
said that “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and
in heels.” The fairer sex is doubly
challenged!
We need a discharge button to get rid of superfluous information cluttering up our minds.
Adding to the (di)stress of coping with all of this, is
doing it with failing eyesight and trying to understand technology which we
didn’t grow up with, and is therefore always an ‘add-on’ skill we are not
genetically engineered to manage.
I’ll
tell you about the experience of a friend who locked herself out of her iPad –
it sums up the middle age chaos theory perfectly!
Harried in the run up to a family holiday overseas, tired
and rushed, she entered the wrong pin on her iPad. Several times. Smugly, the screen demanded a PUK
number. A what? Then, testing her patience, it wanted an IMEI
number as well. Of course, neither of
those gems were written down in the old fashioned manner anywhere, meaning she
had to decipher the minuscular, and very long, numbers on the back of the
unit.
Picture the scene – blood pressure
rising, her reading glasses perched upon her nose, phone propped to shine
additional light onto the iPad, a second pair of glasses held up like a
magnifying glass while she wrote down the number on a piece of paper. Oh, for youth’s eyesight!
Victory was short-lived, because, numbers in hand, the iPad’s
sleek, sneering screen snootily demanded that she call her Carrier and she then
had to track down the correct Vodacom contact number for this problem.
Call centres are the devil’s work and several irritating
calls down dead ends later, following the Vodacom answering misfiling system,
she was taken all over the planet but wasn’t delivered to a person, or the
correct department.
Giving up, she called Nashua Mobile, her service
provider. A real person answered the
phone and put her through to the right person – fabulous. And the genie knew that she’d need a
paperclip to get the sim out, so sent her off to do that, promising to call her
back. Which he did, and in two shakes of
a ducks tail, he found the PUK and she was back in business. She had to choose a new PIN, and is praying
that this number is one she’ll remember!
This is the twilight zone we live in. And how ironic that cutting edge technology
needs a paperclip!
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