I don’t remember who used to say this, but growing up, I remember someone often saying, “I’ll have to make a mental list of that.”  I don’t know why, but those words just appealed to me. Making a mental list was something I imagined as a tiny piece of magic paper in my mind that would somehow hold all of the things I wanted to remember.  It sure would come in handy now that my memory seems to be getting worse by the day.

I decided to “google” it.  I found this quote by Norman Vincent Peale:  “Make a mental list of happy thoughts and pass them through your mind several times every day.”  That’s a terrific idea!  I should do that, before I forget.

I had a great idea today while driving that I felt was just too good to forget.  As it turns out, I was wrong. I haven’t been able to remember it since and have zero confidence in finding that thought anytime soon.  Darn. I wanted to write about it too.

If only I could keep mental lists on everything I wanted to remember.  One of them would have to be names. I once had a fabulous memory that could rattle off the names of pertinent people at committee meetings, and even know the telephone numbers of those people.  What a loss. It is true that one never knows the full value of something quite as well, until one no longer has it.

I decided that maybe the mental list I could handle now, would be to start my day off, as I usually do, with prayer that includes the intention of improving my memory.  Then, I could read a list of happy thoughts, until I could say them by heart. After that, I would just need to keep a running paper list that I would read in the morning after my prayers.

I want to say that I’ll make a mental list of it, but you and I know that it wouldn’t be true. I don’t want to tell myself that I can do something that I know I can’t accomplish. Still, if I could just handle the “happy thoughts” that Mr. Peale wrote about, I think that it would be a step in the right direction.  Sometimes, that is all one can hope for. And that is okay too.