Today something happened that reminded me that I can get a little too used to my schedule a little too quickly. Being someone whose life has involved a fair amount of drastic change, this is not always a bad thing, to be readily adaptable. It is not always a good thing, though. In my mind, it is not a good thing when one forgets what day of the week it is. That usually, to me, signifies that one has had a bit too much free time on one’s hand where time is not a factor. For me, that means two days. Apparently all it takes is one extra day of the week without any sort of time commitments and I lose track of a rather important matter. This is why I generally like to keep myself fairly busy–but even reading and getting ahead on my blog review tours is not the sort of task that provokes the reminder of what day it is.

What did prompt the reminder was an errand that I had to do before leaving town. As one of my more profitable hobbies is statistics (which along with writing happens to be the only hobbies that have ever proven to be financially beneficial in any way so far in my life), I had to take a trip to the bank, which I made in mid-afternoon, initually surprised that all of the good parking places were taken. This was before I realized that it was a Monday and not a Sunday, which prompted me to shake my head at the ease at which I forget such minor details. Given the sort of matters that I remember, it is remarkable what minor details slip my mind.

I suppose I am not alone in this particular condition. Though I am a reasonably focused and detail oriented person, occasionally I get a little bit absent-minded, which is to be expected sometimes. In the case of today, I was not absent-minded enough to do myself harm, just cause myself a bit of mild surprise before I caught myself and recognized what was going on. At other times, though, being absent-minded can be a bit more of a problem. One can get so caught up in intellectual castles in the sky or one’s occasional daydreams to realize what is going on sometimes and one has to gradually, hopefully, get back to earth. Most of the time this is not an unpleasant experience, but sometimes it can be rather jarring if one has not been particularly alert in particularly dangerous circumstances.

Sometimes that is how life goes; we get caught up in our own affairs and stop paying attention to what is going on around us. If we are at least a little bit alert, the presence of something not quite right will prompt us to do some quick thinking and calculating to figure out what is wrong and if we are fortunate no lasting harm is done. At times, though, we are simply not alert to what is going on until we are in positions of considerable danger, which then makes our life much more complicated and our options much less pleasant. The other extreme is no less dangerous, though, of our alarm bells are going off when danger is nonexistent, wearing us out and leaving us unable to respond effectively when those misguided alarm bells are ringing accurately. Either not enough warning or too much warning is not a good thing; either lulls us into a false sense of security or, ironically enough, a false sense of insecurity, both of which can be fatal.

So, while my humorous neglect of the day of the week had no lasting harm, since it was early enough to do what I needed to do before leaving early for another few days working out of town, not all inattention to such matters has been as humorous for myself and others. So long as we can recognize the danger from something that is light and not particularly serious, perhaps we will be better prepared in more serious matters. Let us hope so at least, for there are vastly more troublesome things one can forget than temporarily forgetting what day of the week it is. Not all slips of the memory and of attention are as humorous or easy to rectify.