Thought Picnic: The little foxes of pique

The inexplicable imponderable

A mobile phone holder on my office desk disappears and there is no other explanation for the disappearance beyond the likelihood that the other person who has full access to the apartment has moved it, used it, and lost it.

Yet, we are left to consider the unexplained in terms of the improbable when it is so patently not the case, for to level an accusation might sour the relationship whilst your sense of discomfiture is hardly assuaged by the realisation that you are losing control of your entire to trusted forces out of your control.

Take another example: a wallet that was vacated of essential things with some unimportant items left therein was placed from clear recollection on that office desk the night before a journey. A week later, I got a call that it had been found in the garden that I had not passed through for close to a week before my journey.

Then, it had rained for most of that week, but the wallet was dry having been picked up that morning by a jogger who happened to spot it on her way out for morning exercises. I find myself caught in another debate of the ridiculous. I guess the wallet just thought it was stuffy in the apartment and decided to step out for a walk, then could not find its way back home.

The obsession proposition

Much as one attempts to be unbothered by the minutiae of the hows and whys of what people do out of commission, omission, absentmindedness, carefulness, or carelessness, all of that never really matters if it is not noticed. My inordinate attention to detail that has found the trenchant criticism of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is simply a need to maintain some order amid many other chaotic things totally out of one’s control.

You wonder, why people change things that have always worked for something that they have not had the opportunity to assess the efficacy of. The seemingly immediate advantage is lost to the long-term inconvenience that could exacerbate the annoyance of others.

Patterns are distorted as your record of how things were is displaced and influenced by thinking, events, or people working from a different perspective and have an inclination to tend to an alternate frame of reference. We all suffer from the inability to be inclusive of all the parameters that could make for a perfect setting.

Leave things where they were, be inquisitive but resist interference, consider the quirks of others which are quite different from their faults, and know when to accommodate rather than repudiate. The subtle traversal of advice to correction lies in the deft art of communication. For all times, know the clock should never be wrong.

These are the little foxes that ruin the vineyard in bloom. [BibleHub: Song of Solomon 2:15]