Catherine Groves

Freelance Writer, Copywriter & Editor

Effective, imaginative marketing solutions · Exceptional writing credentials
Known as the "Pit Bull of Proofreading"

Typos, Teeth & Trivial Oopses

by Catherine Groves

Human awareness can be an odd thing. And I don't just mean capital "A" awareness as in spiritual knowing. No, I mean to include something much more mundane: what we see — and what falls through the cracks unseen.

Now I'm one of those folks who is, if politely put, quite detail oriented. I'm not sure I was born this way. In fact, I'd say the reverse. Early on I recognized how easily things could slip my memory. So I trained my mind to be pretty much of a steel trap when it comes to accounting for the details of life. My head holds a running list of those bits of routine I need to remember. And I preview the next step of my agenda by mentally reviewing that list. To be well-organized, and meticulous when it comes to the trivia, seems to make life simpler for me.

Too, I can usually sense when something falls out of the norm, out of the pattern. Perhaps it is a form of intuition, or merely a knack for keen observation. Maybe some angel taps me on the shoulder. But no matter how I might characterize this subcognitive faculty, I tend to smell something at the periphery of my consciousness long before I've a handle on its shape or effect.

But it's not always the things of which I'm aware that cause snafus — not even those things I decide to ignore against my own better judgment. It's those things I never dreamed to bear in mind that hold the more jarring consequences.

The October-December 2000 issue of Christian*New Age Quarterly is a good case in point. By the time I had finished laying out the issue for the printer, I'd been over it so many times that it was etched in the stone of my skull. Each page had been proofed time and again. Each character was scrutinized to make sure it would print cleanly. But I never spotted THE TYPO, which misguided the reader to a completely unrelated page for the continuation of a piece. I must have seen that typo a couple of hundred times before I really saw it.

Since it was too late to correct it, I simply figured out a way to make the best of it. After one has already made a mistake, so I've learned, agonizing over it is pointless. And I've found that's all the more true of the bloopers in life, the stuff of no earth-shaking magnitude. No, the time for agonizing, if one is prone to do so at all, is before a mistake occurs so one can avoid ever making it. Once it has happened, I learn the lesson, make amends and move on. With no way to go back and undo the past, why dwell on the small stuff?

But that typo made me pause to reflect on how things I can't anticipate turn out to be telling. And I lingered over it specifically because of an incident of a few days earlier.

Each morning when I leave the house for work, I review my mental list and check myself against it: have I latched the back door? are the lights turned off? what about the stove? do I have my lunch with me, my keys? After locking the front door, then rattling the doorknob just to be sure, I drove off toward work that day. It was one of those mornings when my mind was focused on all I intended to do, both on the job and on an errand run thereafter. The minutiae of the day's agenda fixed my attention as I drove.

My commute is somewhat of a lengthy one. I was about halfway to work when a shudder of realization struck me: I had forgotten to stick in my teeth. Yep, here I was, midway to work with no time to rush home — while my dentures sat smugly, some ten miles away, on the bathroom counter. The shudder shifted into mounting waves of disorientation. So now what do I do? Go back home, grab the teeth and be late for work? I mean, I'm somewhat new to this denture routine. What's the protocol on forgetting one's teeth? Do people actually ever do this — traipse about in public without their choppers?

Luckily, vanity doesn't loom large on my list of preoccupations. After a second or two of wondering what the heck I should do, I decided to do what I always do: stay the course. When in doubt, move with the momentum of the direction already chosen. After all, stuff happens. So I went to work, minus teeth, but plus one caveat: today, don't smile, just grin.

Now my point in raising this isn't quite to share about typos and teeth. Life, I think, is much larger than the portions that fill our awareness. And I don't mean we can become mindful of the other aspects simply by refocusing our attention or learning more. No, it is precisely those things that do not occur to us that turn out to be striking. These are the kind of things we could kick ourselves for not noticing — but only after the fact. If I had seen the typo, if I had thought I might forget my teeth, those things would never have happened. Nothing I could have done would have brought those things to my awareness before they entered my awareness.

With life and spirituality and all those good, deeper things we tend to discuss here, what lies within our ken isn't necessarily all that is. But we can't stretch the envelope to see what we don't. To do so is outside the nature of human awareness. Clearly, if we could know what exists beyond our focus, at once it would be within our focus. And that's my point: we might not even slimly intuit what hovers just beyond the borders of our perception.

To know that relaxes me. I like knowing that I don't anticipate some things because I can't. Some matters of life are simply unavailable to me, outside my purview. And realizing that, much like typos and teeth, restores life's sense of surprise.

"Typos, Teeth & Trivial Oopses" was originally published by Christian*New Age Quarterly 13:3 (July-September 2001). For more information on Christian*New Age Quarterly, write to Catherine Groves, Editor at PO Box 276, Clifton, NJ 07015-0276 or visit christiannewage.com. (And please bookmark this page prior to leaving this site.)

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