I really hate forgetting things!

Case in point. I was in the car with Mrs. Nickels when an excellent idea for my next blog post came to my mind. Now maybe I should have written my brilliant idea down on a piece of paper.

Or maybe I should have been smart enough to put a note on my phone.

But no, not me!

I decided to trust, as Agatha Christie’s famous fictional Belgium detective Hercule Poirot was fond of saying “the little grey cells.”

Now that I’m sitting here in from of my laptop and dual screens, I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I was going to write about. In fact, I can’t even remember what the inspiration was that gave me the idea to write about in the first place.

I’m sure that there are people out there that will attribute my memory loss to me getting older. That could be true, but I don’t think slow. Because when the census people came to our house and asked Mrs. Nickels how many children we have, she added up the number of kids in our house then adds one more to that figure for me. She then went on to explain to the census taker that her husband is so child-like, why not take advantage of it.

So, if in the eyes of the government, and the charming Mrs. Nickels, I have been listed as “Child-Like,” then how could I be losing my memory because I’m getting older? Because as we all know, kids never forget anything…other than turning in their homework or taking out the trash. Ergo, because I’m just a tall kid, who eats massive amounts of bacon and rides a Harley, age has nothing to do with my memory faux pas.

No, I think my memory lapse is not because of age but because I am given more things to remember in life.

Let’s start with the simple stuff, shall we? Let’s look at Cell Phones for a moment. Most of the people I know do not have a landline phone. Well, they may have it because their cable company made them get one as part of their cable package. Still, for the most part, people are primarily using their cell phone as their primary contact number.

That being said, how many of you remember your cell phone number? Good! I see hands from all over the world go up. Now, how many remember their spouse’s/partner’s cell number. And I don’t mean that you have it on speed dial either. I mean, how many of you remember the actual cell phone number. Yeah, not as many hands went up that time.

But wait, I’m not done here. How many of you know your kids’ numbers, your parents’ numbers, your office number, your doctor’s phone number, the number to the pizza delivery place? Granted, when I was a kid, the only number I had to worry about was the number to my own home and maybe my best friend’s, and later on, my girlfriend’s house.

Now, try this. How many of you know when you met your spouse/partner? I mean the month, day, and year. How about their birthday, your kids’ birthdays, your grandkids birthdays, your anniversary? How about the next time you have to take your car in for maintenance, and the next time YOU have to take yourself in for a check-up/maintenance?

But let us forget numbers and dates here for second and look at something else.

We live in a world of information. Everywhere you look, be it on your phone, TV, books, newspapers, blog sites, websites, social media, whatever, we are bombarded by information. And it is not just one kind of information, it’s all kinds of information from every known topic under the sun.

For example: According to Hopper HQ, Kylie Jenner makes $1.2 Million per Instagram Post. But Sean Connery has, according to Celebrity Net Worth, £226 Million (that’s $348,321,680.00 in American dollars) in the bank. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is reporting that we are in the most critical life-changing Presidential Election since the last life-changing event from four years ago. Are you up to date on your COVID facts and information? We, as a society, have to keep ourselves informed continuously. Failure to keep ourselves up to date on everything that is out there puts us at risk from being intellectually, socially, and financially left behind.

And I think that is a huge mistake. We, as a society, are mistaking data for knowledge. It’s like what Anthony J. D’Angelo wrote in his book The College Blue Book when he said, “In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information.” We are continually looking for new information/data in places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TMZ, and the mainstream media. But what have we learned?

Knowledge is what you have learned from the information you have collected. But wisdom is how you apply the knowledge you have gained from the information you’ve gathered—case in point. Through your gathering of information/data, you’ve learned that a tomato is actually a fruit. That’s knowledge. But wisdom knows you do not put tomatoes into a fruit salad.

We are cramming so much information into our brains in our efforts to stay up to date and keep ourselves informed that we forget what’s really important.  We may know everything there is to know about Kylie Jenner and Sean Connery, but we haven’t a clue as to the color of the eyes of the people who mean the world to us. We don’t know how they take their coffee, what makes them laugh, what their favorite food is, their likes, dislikes, goals, dreams, or aspirations. We make no attempt to find out these things until it’s too late, and then the people we’ve “forgotten” about and want to learn more of are no longer here.

So, what am I saying here? What I’m getting at is to remember those around you more than you need to know what is going out in the world. I’m not saying you should just put your head in the sand or be ignorant as to what is going on around you in the world. But those “famous people” you took the time to really “get to know,” trust me, they don’t even know you exist. But your family, THEY are the ones you need to get to know and really remember.

We now return you to your COVID suspended regularly scheduled life…somewhat in progress.