Too Much Time and Not Enough Brains

Most of last Tuesday was spent with Mother at the hospital in her heart doctor’s office.  As most of you know, the time spent for a doctor’s appointment is mostly waiting in an area full of other people waiting to see a doctor.  Some are old, some are young, but most are bored.  Many of them thumb through a magazine, glare at the muted TV mounted on the wall and watching the other people around them.

The past few months Mother has really wanted me to go with her to her appointments, where she used to be independent and want people to think she could handle everything on her own.  She has started getting confused about her surroundings when out in the public and cannot remember what her doctors tell her during her visits.  Having had several mild strokes recently, I am sure it is hard for her to think straight most of the time.  I know we must look strange to all we meet – an elderly wobbly woman with a cane being helped by a younger wobbly woman with a cane – it probably looks like quite the pair!

While waiting for Mother’s turn with the doctor, I was thinking about how much time I seem to waste sitting and being unproductive.  Most of the time, it is because my MS is causing me to be unable to do much of anything.  Sometimes it is wasted time waiting for appointments, standing in line at the grocery store or tossing and turning in the bed, trying to get to sleep.  If I could put all that time together, I bet it would be amazing how many days it would add up to be.

Often during those times when I am in the house, it is quiet and sleep won’t come, I think of countless things I need or want to do.  Most of the time I make lists, since my brain usually does not recall all those things I was thinking about doing.  Too many times, that list just grows old before I get to it and gets buried beneath all the other lists I make after that one.

When I was working, there never seemed to be enough time to get all my household chores done when I got home.  During most of those years, I was living near Mobile, Pensacola and New Orleans was close enough to visit often.  As you can imagine, those areas offered a variety of places to spend leisure time and engage in activities.  Unfortunately, there was usually not enough time in a week left for those type of things.  Although I no longer live near those places, there are still many activities to enjoy if I could.  Now it is not time that hinders my engaging in those things, it is my physical and mental inability to function well enough to do them.

I was reading a friend’s blog the other day and she was writing about people watching her.  I wrote a poem about that when I was a teen, which was quite a few years ago:

People watching

Caring not if I live or die

People watching

 Caring not if I laugh or cry

People watching

 Rushing, rushing from place to place

People watching

Seeing, seeing, but knowing not my face

People watching

Why?????

So many people waste a lot of their time wondering about and thinking about other people’s business. If they only knew how much most of us would like to have the use of that time………wouldn't it be nice to have too much brains and not enough time??!!!