One of the things that I really like in my life is when I know exactly where to find something. I call it “a gift from my past self”.
Here’s a tricky (heh) set of connections I made recently.
Brett is now the proud owner of a tree frog. He won it in a raffle at the “welcome back” celebration at his school.
We’d had the frog for a day, and it became clear that the poor thing was a little chilly; it sat in one place without moving for over 24 hours. He needed a heat lamp.
Back in 1995 or so, I had a pet iguana. When the iguana died, I kept the heat lamp from its tank. Through 15 years of moving around, the silly heat lamp kept following me. Most recently, it was sitting on the top of a shelf in the garage on Bellflower.
Well, everything from the garage on Bellflower (and everything from the house, too) was recently put into boxes (not by me), and shipped to Hilltop. Sure, the boxes are labeled, but even with our current state of mostly-unpacked, there are still a lot of boxes out there in the shop.
How to find the heat lamp?
I’d just been doing some organization in the shop, and among the boxes Kristi and I found was one labeled “Halloween Decor”. Now, my wife’s had the Halloween stuff up for a couple of weeks already, so this was clearly not stuff from the “holiday bins”. We’d set the box aside, near the other holiday decorations, with the eventual intent of unpacking it and sorting the holiday stuff all together.
Why do I mention this?
Well, there were a couple of Halloween pieces that didn’t fit in the bin, and they also lived on the top of the shelf of the garage on Bellflower. The holiday bins themselves were way on the other side of the garage on Bellflower. So seeing “Halloween Decor” on a box did not trigger “over by the holiday bins”, especially not since the Halloween stuff was already up. It triggered “top of shelf” instead.
So when I needed the heat lamp (Kristi and I had a short conversation about “do we even still own that thing?”), I went out to the shop, opened the Halloween Decor box, and there it was, right at the bottom of the very first box I opened.
Why should I have been able to do this? To go from “heat lamp” to “top of shelf” to “Halloween Decor”, side trip to “clearly not the stuff from the bins”, and to be able to pop one box open and have the needed object in 5 minutes? I don’t attribute this to any particular affinity for the heat lamp (although I did resist throwing it away several times over the years).
I don’t have a good explanation of why I should know where such a trivial object is sitting, nor why I should have been able to make the connection between the box that was labeled and the object inside so quickly and easily. This is not the first time something like that has happened.
I can say that I take a lot of joy from being able to perform such feats of connection. So maybe I unconsciously spend time mapping out my world, so that at some later time, I can realize the gift that my self of years gone by has left for me.
And to that previous self, all I can say is “Thank you”.