Snippets to change your life

Are you one of those people who cannot read a newspaper without cutting out an article for later reference or marking things out, maybe copying down a few lines of special interest? Of course, you don’t stop at that. You also have a notebook in which you save up lines worth remembering, you have a captioned file where you keep everything neatly and you go back to it every couple of weeks to remind yourself that change is constant and you have to keep up with it.

Well, maybe YOU do that.

Unfortunately, there are some of us who do not go beyond that first line. I frequently cut out articles, but mostly I save whole pages of the newspaper. It all depends on what grabs my attention each day. Sometimes I’m involved in sports and know scores and moves like the back of my hand, sometimes it is state elections, sometimes United States elections, sometimes it is travel destinations at bargain prices, sometimes it is business and the latest bail out or shut down, or health and what to eat and where.

So, as soon as my eyes fall on an article of interest among the topics of interest for the day, I know that one glance is not going to be enough. I have to read it again. Later. At leisure. Maybe it will help me become a better investor, or guide me with my exercise regimen, or form the basis for the next decision about where to go or where not to go in the holidays. Maybe it will give my imagination a boost and I will finally find a suitable ending for the story that has been playing itself over in my mind.

Of course, a pair of scissors is never handy, so out comes the entire page. Those sheets of newsprint then lie on the table until in a weekly (or thereabouts) frenzy of neatening up, there are taken to a safer place to be looked at another day. Usually it is the kitchen rack since that is one place no other member of the family approaches — and those carefully saved pages enjoy a long and peaceful sojourn there. I’ll get to them in a couple of months, I promise myself. But I get to the tea and coffee containers, the pepper and salt, the sauces and the essences, while those papers stay undisturbed — until another fit of spring cleaning sees them dumped into a carton and shoved under the bed or behind the sofa — to be looked at in another couple of years.

Now, those years have come — newspaper snippets, pages, even entire issues, leap out at me from various corners of the house. It is time to put them to use — make those life altering changes I had resolved to long ago. Balance the household budget that has stayed in the red for a good three decades, become a better investor even if income is restricted now that one of us is tired and the other is retired.

So I delve into that pile of newspaper clippings, but to my horror, it is hard to figure out which side of the paper I had wanted in the first place. Was it the business section or the sports section? Was I following football at the time or was it Wimbledon? Who was I rooting for last year or the year before? Did I want life insurance or medical insurance or was it the article on the eclipse that was appealing?

All those tomorrows I had planned on making of value have come and gone and I continue to flounder as I always did. Obviously, for some people, things don’t change.

— Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India