I took my children to Sycamore Grove Park. We walked along the path and enjoyed seeing the birds and ground squirrels. We stopped by a small pond and my two teen-age daughters tried to skip stones across the surface of the water. My four-year-old son picked up a rock and looked at it. “I wish it would splash,” he said as he threw it into the pond. It was a memorable moment for me.
The mind is a fickle thing. It snatches insignificant moments and stores them deep in memory and then brings them out at random moments, It doesn’t remember the things I want to remember. Phone numbers and addresses register in my mind and then vanish. I think of an item I need to add to my grocery list, and by the time I exit my car it is forgotten. I stand in the middle of a room and wonder What did I come for? Or I meet a friend and I’m sure that I know that person, but the name is playing hooky somewhere else and won’t come out.
Emotions are also stored in my mind, and I never know when they might escape. I saw a rat multiple times in my garage before we succeeded in catching that tricky creature. Now when I go into the garage at night, I realize that I am looking for that rat. Is he here? Did he come back? No. But my mind won’t let go of the memory that a rat was here in the past and might show up again, and I need to be watchful just in case.
My mind is a fickle thing. It remembers some things and forgets others. But I like it. I think I’ll keep it.