Forgetting

They tell you it will be your car keys.  Or your partner's birthday.  Maybe it will be one of the 317 passwords you have to remember to live effectively in this digital world.  Email?  Bank?  Damn, even my car has a password. They tell you that making them all the same, well that is just silly.  An invitation for everyone to steal everything, right down to your last penny, if not your entire identity. No matter, those will be the signs you are beginning to loose your mind-- or your memory.  (or both) 

Isn't it odd though, that the greatest danger is not that some mysterious and nefarious soul from a foreign land will find out our magical codes and render us soul-less, or at least money-less for a period of time. No, the greatest danger is something much different indeed.  A a crime of which we are both perpetrator and victim.  We spend forty years or so going through so many experiences.  Loosing those keys, loosing those midnight love affairs, loosing the bright eyed child that drove us to dream the big dreams and, sometimes, live them.  Trying, failing, trying failing, and, occasionally succeeding.  But at some point deep down in the sober beauty of the annual fall, as the trees move through their season with silent grace, you realize that in the quest to remember the small, you have forgotten the large.  

In the silence of a phone that doesn't ring, a job that maybe doesn't fit, a loved one who just doesn't understand, or a dream that remains in some way unlived you start to realize the biggest thing we can forget is ourselves.  We know by now what to do to succeed.  We know Mom was right, about that swimming too close to eating rule, about her lessons for finding a good mate, and for how to make good meatloaf.  (growing up in the Midwest has it advantages) 

But in the turmoil and the stress, the aggravation and the disappointment, and in the living of every day, we drift away sometimes from that inner knowing into a land of outer doing.  Only to wake up one morning to realize that we are not writing anymore, we are not taking photos any more, we are not spending time with our friends anymore.  We have somehow discarded the ingredients list for the life we want to live and we are left tired, fat, and still hungry. 

At the most important time, we have begun a decent into the earth bound box long before we ever should. Driven by distraction towards a premature departure.  If driving shouldn't be done wtih diverted attention, then living certainly should not be done that way either.  

Amazing is it not? With such a monitored, listened to and tracked life.  Where our entire day can be planned and verified by a device out of Star Trek, that the device never bothers to give us the important reminder of all.  Maybe someone should invent an app that does that.  Oh well, its probably not worth it-- I would just forget my password.