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We all, on occasion, every once in a while, incessantly, check to see if we actually did the Thing we set out to do, like setting an alarm or locking a door. “Wait a minute. Did I set the alarm?” We ask ourselves, then we check to make sure we did. An hour later, we check again.
It’s not that we are all super neurotic or forgetful, it’s just that we are constantly, in our minds, reprioritizing, and what seemed insignificant at 6 p.m., like setting an alarm for an early morning meeting, is suddenly VERY important when you are tossing and turning in your bed at 1 AM!
In addition, we are all creatures of habit, and when we do something over and over and over again, like lock a car door, we don’t necessarily register the event in our brains. This is a lot of mumbo jumbo for what can easily be summed up in one quick word for what we all do; we DOUBT ourselves and then spend countless hours in our lifetime, rechecking what we already did!
I would doubt my ability to accomplish these mundane tasks less, IF I never forgot to do something; but, sometimes, I do forget. Sometimes I forget to move the laundry from the washing machine into the dryer. I really hate that because laundry that is damp and sitting in a closed laundry machine for a day or two starts to smell icky, which requires me to hit the rewash button when I discover it, which I usually do when I am about to put in another load.
Sometimes I forget to make sure that my alarm is set for AM, rather than PM, and it doesn’t go off, which was okay because I got up anyway but highly disconcerting when it starts blaring in the middle of dinner out with friends.
Sometimes I forget to actually hit the button to close the garage door and I discover that a bird has decided to make a nest in the safety and protection of the garage rafter. This discovery then leads to purposely leaving the garage door open, lest momma bird can’t access her nest, which, I then forget to do.
Once, I forgot to check to make sure that I had hit all of the correct settings on the automatic recording of a favorite program and instead of sitting down to watch the entire season I had missed from episode 1; I watched only the last 6 episodes, which I had, indeed, directed my DVR to save…
Since NOT rechecking some of the more mundane tasks I do on a daily basis has resulted in some bad outcomes, I, like millions of others, recheck myself constantly. But since, I, like millions of others, am not obsessive about rechecking EVERYTHING I do over and over again, I still forget to do things. We all do! This is why there are built in road blocks on all of the required information for any on-line order form. If those things weren’t there, let’s face it, we’d forget to fill in the box thinking we had already input the credit card expiration date or the fact that we really do want only ONE light green small sweater. Now that I think about it… did I already write a column titled Recheck? Let me check…. CONFIRM! CONFIRM!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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