(With thanks to the one and only Rarasaur. Without her, I would have overlooked this WordPress daily post suggestion – “tell us about a talent you’d love to have, but don’t” – entirely. As it is, I’m only a day late…)
Oh, there are lots of things I wish I could do effortlessly. Draw. Run. Make my hair do what I want it to do. (We’ve come to an understanding, my hair and me. I wash and brush it as needed and let it do pretty much what it prefers, and it sits on top of my head and points in various directions and smirks.) But none of those is the biggie, the talent I long to have and never expect to master.
If I only could get organized. (To the tune of that song from the Wizard of Oz, you know, the one the scarecrow sings. Or maybe each of Dorothy’s buddies gets a verse of his own. If I were organized, I’d know, wouldn’t I?)
But I’m not organized. I tackle all sorts of things…I write, I blog, I take photos, I bake, I knit, I, I, I get interested in a lot of stuff. Shiny! The world is so full of a number of things, as that poet, you know, Whitman, or Stevenson, or Plath, said. And I want to play with most of them.
Focus, I don’t got it. If only I could just set most of my mental toys gently but firmly to one side and concentrate on the most important. I’m not so sure that would work well, though.
How do you cope when you’re working hard on a project and reach a dead end, a puzzle you don’t see how to solve? Well, I need to concentrate on something completely different – then my mind wanders off exploring and comes back with solutions to unrelated problems. When I force myself to drive grimly straight ahead toward one goal, I wind up exhausted, depressed, and incompetent. When I keep juggling, sooner or later one of my problem balls hatches like a Czarist jeweled Easter egg…shiny!…and hands me an answer.
Maybe my best plan is to treat my mind like my hair: just learn to live with its quirks.
