So I forgot for a few minutes that we had a baby here at the house. Big Deal. To be honest, I was totally oblivious. I truly didn’t have a clue, that a small infantile child had arrived and is now part of the world my wife and I share in this house.

I wasn’t asleep or dreaming. I was in fact quite wide awake, and with it… kinda.

See I had just come home from a double-header sand volleyball match. I was quite hungry too and when I blew through the back door, I saw my pretty wife, sitting at the bar area in our kitchen. I couldn’t wait to tell her the bump-by-bump-by-spike description of our games. I was already thinking food too. I started probably with the fridge, then slamming cabinet doors in search of an appetizer.

I clanked dishes and talked up a storm. I had a full plate of homemade enchilada and was settling into my meal, when I suddenly looked up, right into the eyes of my wife. “I forgot we had a baby… didn’t I??” I stammered,,, “Uh, yeah.” she hushedly agreed…

I was a little embarrassed momentarily. It wasn’t that our little sweet girl was at the back of my mind, behind the obviously more important volleyball and dinner issues… She just was ‘poof!’ erased for that bit of time! When I walked into the house, I saw a scene that is so familiar, my wife in the kitchen by herself. I was excited to talk to her. I wanted to get out, all these action scenes from the games we just played. The baby was nowhere in sight.

Little Joella was in our bedroom, asleep in the bassinet, and luckily, not awoken or otherwise amused my loud clamoring and carousing in the kitchen. My wife, so forgiving, let me vent and let me eat, and then walked back into reality with me, as the truth came back into my mind 🙂 She’s a sweetie 🙂

So here we go. People can ask about the all the foundation-rocking, life-altering adjustments that happen with a newborn, and I completely forget about mine… for a minute anyway 🙂

Our minds are complex and crazy sometimes. At least mine is. I know you know that, if you’ve read very many of these posts over the last few years. Truthfully, the ideas, the pictures, and the essence of the emotions that follow the stream of stories running through my brain, almost completely consume my days… and my nights too…

In quick rare moments, like a game of volleyball, or a split second of this writing endeavor, my mind is blank and I am just ‘doing’ and not ‘thinking’. If there is average amount of thoughts-per-day that the normal 36 year old male homo sapien, experiences per day, then I’m pretty certain I can quadruple it… at least.

I mean to say, that ‘thinking’ overtakes my world, almost all the time. Thinking about what I’m doing, or not doing. Thinking about how I’m being or not being. Thinking about what you’re doing or not doing. Thinking about what you’re being or feeling or even thinking about what you’re thinking. When I get to thinking that I should quit thinking about what you are or aren’t thinking, then I have chased the tail of my own thought process into tight pretzel knot! (By ‘you’, I mean the seemingly ever-present, current issue of the they or them or he or she or it, that I’ve chosen to chew on like mentally regurgitated cud, over and over and over again)

And how helpful all this over-thinking seems to be!

Ha!

Riiiiiiiight.

Not.

Nope, I actually tend to agree that it isn’t a good way to engage my cerebral capacities, but like a runaway stagecoach, it is almost unstoppable sometimes!

And stopped it could be. Redirected at least. Slowed down a bit?

I like seeing that I forgot about our cute little darling daughter Joella Denise. I can laugh at the pointlessness of my pea-sized brain. I can notice that although my mind seems to be so brilliantly discerning and dissecting each trifling microsecond of my mundane life moments, it can also simultaneously lose track of the most important.

Ha! Maybe my brain isn’t as smart as I think it is. Maybe my thinking might not be as poignant and important, as I tend to let it become.

As has been quoted many times before “Don’t believe everything you think.”

If my mind can let slip, this little miracle, then what other things is it forgetting to account for? What possibilities is it overlooking? What broken-record patterns does it follow, without seeing the chances to shift all around?

Maybe I could just take a step back. I could let the mind unwind and not worry that it needs to be directing everything all the time. There are more important things to attend to right now, and I don’t want to forget that again 🙂

Sincerely,

Aaron Nichols