Loose Ends: Time to change mental maps

The trailer hitch wasn’t supposed to be there. My mental map didn’t place it properly.
Yes, it was a homeowner’s driveway I was crossing over from the street to the sidewalk.
Yes, I had trod this path more than three or four times a day for the past 30 or so years.
Yes, I should have looked up from my reading. However, it was not where it was supposed to be, and the hitch nearly gored me.
Although I am not sure that is the proper word for describing my actions in respect to an inanimate object. It almost put out my eye (and gave me a sizable concussion) by simply being somewhere it shouldn’t.
Family and friends (aging right alongside me) tell of their close calls: almost running into an obstacle in the yard or tripping over something in the house. Many of them report it has nothing to do with age.
My misplacement of common household necessities, such as house keys (and of late my cell phone is not new, really.)
That must have been the reason my students called me Mrs. Forgetful fairly often. I always assumed I would overlook something. It just didn’t occur to me that it would escalate each year.
Once I got in the habit of walking to and from my job at the elementary school each day, my brain and my legs just moved into cruise control. I began to take so many things for granted. I got used to the fact that the hit-and-miss pattern of parked cars along my regular route were occasional obstacles, as were the increasing numbers of cars dropping kids on and off at school. However, they were predictable, as odd as that sounds.
Each of us seem to have our own particular parameters of place for household items, which are predictable and reassuring to us, but age seems to cause one to forget the specifics somehow. It could be the realization that all of these rules are self-imposed is the biggest change for most of us.
Stress is not only caused by the should-of, could-of and would-of’s of life, but by the supposed-to’s, as well. It is not exactly how I viewed this stage of life.
Beginning my second career almost five years ago, I thought I had gotten rid of all of those niggling negativisms.
What could be so hard about working from a home office? It is that pesky mental map my brain constructed all by itself years ago. I may have decided to tear it down, and do some reconstruction, but my brain didn’t dismantle the old model.
Tell that to my brain, will ya?
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