In absentia?

 

Disclaimer. This is a dark blog. Read at your own risk. E&OE. 

I’ve been absent-minded for as long as I can remember. I still feel the embarrassment from Primary School, as it was called in those days, of going home during the morning break, believing it was lunchtime. Yes, they walked to school then. My mother phoned and they said “You may as well keep him until lunchtime”. I can see the stern teacher asking “Will the little boy who went home at breaktime stand up?”. In short trousers and double-breasted raincoat, I complied. The memories are rekindled by visiting the Forest of Dean this week, prompting me to recall Dennis Potter’s psychodramas.  And on the first day at the “big school”, the Grammar, I completely missed the acronymic directions to the chemistry class, and was found in tears, lost in a seemingly endless corridor. 

Years later, as a tutor in nursing education, a student called in with a query. I needed to consult a colleague in an adjacent building about the matter, and asked her to wait in the empty classroom.  Her name may have been Patience, from Zimbabwe as I recall. Patient she was indeed, as an hour later I remembered that I had forgotten her, having been distracted elsewhere. I returned with the answer to her question, profusely apologetic: she was still there, quietly waiting without complaint. 

Is it a familial feature? My father was often seen gazing vacantly into space, while years later an old Portsmouth Dockyard colleague of his told me he had been polite, quiet, and rather distant to work with. Photos of his mother reveal a far-away demeanour.  Being aware, and “in the moment” are seen as dimensions of mindfulness, a concept borrowed from Buddhism, yet there the ideal is of transcending the Self. Critiques of the mental health industry have long been concerned that everyday, normal experiences have become increasingly pathologised by the “experts”.  And today, those clever psychologists and psychiatrists are still milking this cash cow in every sphere of human life. 

Some will use alcohol or drugs to mask the trauma of reality. A healthier way of coping is just to “switch off” instead. And there’s plenty of that trauma to worry about today. Around the world, wars without end, genocides, pandemic piled upon pandemic. Read any of the news media, and they seem to revel in saying “we’re all doomed”. How can anyone cope if they truly try to empathise with the victims of unspeakable ongoing atrocities? Unspeakable because doing otherwise would bring it to stark and gruesome attention.  It’s not here, they say, it’s somewhere else in the world. If you can’t see it, does it matter to you? Such is the young child’s slow introduction to the concept of “object permanence". Some never attain this in adulthood. But sensitivity to events far away, or even long ago, is emotional maturity for the internationalist. 

Absentmindedness has been described as the opposite of mindfulness. Is that really so? Far out, outta sight, turn on, tune in, drop out. It’s taken me nearly 70 years, but I feel more attuned to the world now thanks not to psychotherapy, but to psychogeography. Absent minded no more.

 
LINKS

Mindfulness as the antidote to forgetfulness — The Insight to Wellbeing Initiative (insight-to-wellbeing.com)

Get Over Yourself: Cultivating Self-Transcendence — My Best Self 101
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - Wikipedia

Moncrieff - Psychiatric Imperialism: The Medicalisation of Modern Living | Academy for the Psychoanalytic Arts (academyanalyticarts.org)

Turn on, tune in, drop out - Wikipedia