It was snowing, heavily. I’d just finished helping clean the martial arts academy after our instructor training class and had bundled myself into a blue down jacket, a faded patterned hat, and a single black glove. Drats. I’d arrived with two gloves but was now leaving with only one. A check of pockets and jacket sleeves failed to turn up the missing glove.
It’s no fun when things disappear from our lives. Some of those vanishings are inconsequential; while it is annoying to lose a sock or a glove, the world still turns at the same velocity. Other disappearances are more challenging. The globe’s spin is never the same when someone we love leaves us. It is off-kilter, at least temporarily, when good health or job security slip from our grasps.
This, fortunately, was not a major loss. So I zipped, bundled up, and trundled into the cold night, both hands stuffed into their respective jacket pockets. One glove worked just fine when I cleared snow from the car’s windshield and windows. I tried to put its partner’s departure from my mind.
The subconscious, however, has its own ideas. It perseverates. It observes perturbations in the typically smooth surface of space-time and it tries to suss out their source. This guy entered the kung fu school with two gloves on his hands. He left with only one and he’d shared the duties of sweeping, mopping, and tidying up the school. The glove should not have had an opportunity to exit his life. Someone would have seen it.
Stop, subconscious! Hands, don that other glove pair there, the ones you inherited from Dad that are always sitting on the passenger seat. Eyes, focus on the road before you. Let’s all pay attention to the unplowed six inches of snow covering that road, the swirl of precipitation falling atop us and the night, the poor visibility that accompanies a winter storm.
My conscious self can be so serious. It can forget things about me, such as the enjoyment I get from driving in the snow, especially when other people aren’t doing the same thing. I used the back roads as much as I could and had a nice car-ski home. The trip required a nice blend of focus and forgetfulness.
Once out of my car, the conversation restarted. Hey, the subconscious said, where did that other glove get to? It doesn’t make any sense that he lost it. Is he sure that it’s still not stuffed into a pocket? The conscious tried its best to ignore the banter. It focused on a little bit of shoveling by the front door, on getting dry things from the garage into the entryway, on the comfort that a nice wool hat brought to the head and ears, on the hat itself and how long I’d had it, on the worn wool of the hat covering the head and ears, on the hat, on the bulkiness of that hat, on the possibility that – no, could it be possible? – that the missing glove was sitting inside the hat, atop of my head.
No wonder the hat was keeping me so warm!
There are plenty of things that I wish my mind would leave be. Every day, usually without any effort, a steady stream of thoughts flows behind my forehead. Some thoughts I pay attention to. Others I seem to have no awareness they are happening. Occasionally, I either direct my mind to think on a particular topic or I sit down by the banks of my mind’s river and just watch the thought current bounce by. It’s nice not to always feel responsible for guiding the mind flow. It can feel reassuring to dry off on the shore.
Until, that is, when I do things without paying attention. This morning, for example, a bobcat crossed the road in front of me. I was just leaving the house, on the beginning of a drive to the airport, when I saw an animal that, at first from a distance, I assumed was a large domestic cat. As I pulled closer, I realized that this wasn’t someone’s pet. As if to prove the point, the animal stopped and a second bobcat appeared on the other side of the road. I stopped too, to let them pass. They were very polite; the second bobcat only crossed when it was clear that it was her turn. Her partner, already on the other roadside shoulder, waited patiently for her. Once across the road, they turned and looked at me. The second cat seemed to suppress an instinct to wave.
Hey, I almost heard her say before she slipped into the bushes, are you sure you put your luggage in the back of your car?
What?
The luggage? You know, those clothes you need tomorrow in Philadelphia for your meetings?
Of course I’d put my luggage in the car. Hadn’t I? To humor my new friend, I pulled off the road, not too many yards away from where she and her partner had disappeared into the bushes. Wait, I thought, were those really wild cats that had just sauntered across the morning road? They looked like kids going off to school. Had I really just seen what I saw?
Ah. How things out of sight like to sometimes stay in mind.