Have you ever had something disappear and searched for it everywhere only to have it magically reappear right where it was supposed to be?
Psychologists say that our brain is often the one that hides things. Our eyes are selective. I know, as a person who is hard of hearing, that I had to retrain my brain not to hear all the sounds a hearing aid picks up, which our brain normally filters out. The same thing goes for eyes. Our brain decides what is important and ignores the rest. If you search for something in a specific spot and it's even slightly out of place, your brain may not register it at all. In effect, it becomes invisible. It may reappear later when you are in a different mental state and simply not looking so hard.
Right now, my little watercolour palette and my TV remote are both hiding from me. We tend to say the Borrowers took things when they disappear like that. The Borrowers are tiny wee folk who live in your walls or under your floorboards. This is much-loved folklore, and in 1952, Mary Norton even wrote a children's book about them. The Borrowers do not steal your belongings; they just borrow them and use them in their own homes. They tend to take little things that you shouldn't miss, but often do anyway.
I do not know where my TV remote is. It is always kept in the same area, and it's not there. It's not anywhere else in that room either. If it was just my selective eyes not seeing it, then my hubby should have been able to find it when he looked. We tore the furniture apart and vacuumed the crevices and dusted underneath. It's been a few days, and we have even looked in other rooms! That TV remote is, indeed, missing. The paint palette is also not anywhere that I would expect, it to be, but maybe my studio is just in need of straightening out.
I had a little book I wanted to give someone. It disappeared months ago. I looked through all the other items nearby. I even asked my hubby to look through some of the stuff that he had put away. It was simply gone. Then, this week, while dusting the exact spot where I had last seen it, that little book reappeared. It is not like I have not dusted there a million times since it vanished. It had to be the Borrowers who took it, and finally decided to bring it back. I do hope they return the TV remote a lot faster than that!
