The nights afterwards in this place were not bad like the first one, because I then had my bearings. All my senses had touched the objects about me. But it was lying in that smothering dark and not knowing what was near me – what I might touch if I reached out a hand – that made the first night so horrible.

Emily Carr, from her memoir Klee Wyck (1941)

Life is not some high pursuit of truth and beauty. It is remembering where you put something. I call this the place memory of small things. This memory functions only in coordination with proprioception – the sensory system in muscles, joints, and tendons that tells your body where it is in space and in relation to other objects. It’s not enough to remember where you left something. Your body has to then figure out how to move through space to find it. Proprioception helps you find things. It also keeps you from falling off cliffs.

I love the word. It sounds like a dance I am doing when I am looking for the turmeric I thought I left in the spice drawer only to twirl and find it on the kitchen counter.

Once your body has put something down or found its way to some destination and your brain remembers this information, your body, as a general rule and until systems start failing, will find the object or get you where you want to be, again and again and again. Decades can go by, and place memory for small things will help you find something you left in a box in the basement.

And all the searching occurs in the background, quietly, hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. This graceful and barely acknowledged fluidity of moving through space looking for small things all day frees up the mind so that it seems as if all our cognitive energy is focused on the search for truth and beauty. Or perhaps on some other human pursuit such as happiness, kinship, kindness, righteousness, gratification, jealousy, malice, revenge, or mischief.

I don’t much like the dark. It is a serious impediment when wayfinding or searching for objects. Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr captured my aversion. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, she was an intrepid explorer of the First Nations lands of British Columbia catching rides on fishing boats and other watercraft, a female traveling solo except for a canine companion, usually a small Griffon. Her description of the utter darkness of her first night in the Nisga’a village of Laxgalt’ap (known also as Greenville) is testament to my dread of losing my bearings.

About ten years ago I spent a few weeks interviewing physiatrists and physical and occupational therapists for a project I was working on for Mayo Clinic. This is when I began my wonderment for the place memory of small things. People who work in the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) spend their careers helping people find things and to move their bodies through space after strokes, brain injuries, broken bones, joint replacements, a sports injury, as a consequence of aging, or because of Parkinson’s or other movement disorders.

People choose a career path for a lot of different reasons, some fall into a job and others have a passion. I could be wrong but it seems to me that PM&R providers fall on the passion end of the spectrum.

One thing for sure, they are always talking fervently about ADLs, among themselves or to their patients. Activities of Daily Living. Yes, that is what we do, performing ADLs over and over. Brushing teeth. Opening a cabinet. Putting on socks. Finding where we put binoculars and picking them up. Lifting a cast iron skillet. Weeding the garden. Finding the keys to put in the ignition. Finding the car where we parked it. Hugging people we love. Climbing a ladder. Bending down. Not falling down. (Try to make a list of the ADLs you perform in one day. Ha!)

It is unfortunate, I think, that ADLs is a dull acronym for our dance through life to get somewhere or to find something we need or want or someone we love.

I am writing this before I can’t find it.

Barring a swifter demise (heart attack, fatal car accident, stage 4 cancer), it is likely the dance will start to lose precision or momentum or both. There are of course those anomalous persons whose search abilities – memory coupled with proprioception – never wane until their curtain goes down. Consider the years of repetitive searches, calling on the brain to set the body in motion. It does begin to sound exhausting. When I was a Hospice volunteer, my privilege was often to sit with a person at end of life while his or her caregiver could run errands and take a break. Most often that person was sleeping. I have no medical ground to back up my conjecture, but I came to the conclusion that the elders in my charge were simply tired of looking for things. If nothing else, it is valuable advice to self. There comes a time to lie down and stop searching.