A pair months ago, a friend of mine lost her phone. The subsequent day, one other friend lost his wallet. These items weren’t just misplaced; they didn’t surface the following day. They hadn’t slid out of a pocket and down between the couch cushions only to be found while tidying the home. The phone and wallet disappeared and didn’t come back. They seemed well and truly lost.
We misplace things on a regular basis. “Keys, phone, wallet,” I repeat as a mantra before I leave the home, the office, the bar, patting my pockets to ensure we’re intact. We’ve all experienced that “Oh no, where’s my …” feeling. We’re sure we lost some essential item and are hit with a sense of doom so intense, it’s almost breathtaking. Then, just as quickly, that exquisite wash of relief if you find that your phone is, in actual fact, within the pocket of your coat — false alarm, crisis averted. You’re, for a moment, a modified person, a one who glimpsed the horror of getting to call the D.M.V., and also you got a last-minute reprieve. You’ll keep higher track of your stuff any further. You never need to feel that way again.
Misplacing stuff after which finding it’s on a regular basis nonsense. Losing things is rarer. The undeniable fact that two good friends lost essential things back-to-back seemed weird, like a specific variety of bad luck had zeroed in on my social circle. Someone smart once advised me that when things seem strange or confusing or too symbolically weighty, we would ask ourselves, “How would I interpret this if it were a dream?” It puts a long way between us and what’s happening. What if I had a dream during which people in my life kept losing their things? How would I interpret that?
“Lose something on daily basis. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “One Art.” The poem begins by discussing the lack of inconsequential things like keys, then moves on to greater losses: “three loved houses,” “two rivers, a continent,” “even losing you.” Small losses prepare you for large ones.
Within the dream during which my friends keep losing seemingly insignificant things, I see symbols. The wallet and the phone are boring essentials, the untreasured, unremarked-upon tools of living that we take with no consideration until we lose them. Then their import comes into shiny focus: What was even in my wallet? License, bank cards, so many receipts. Was there a present card that I’ll never get back? Things were really easy before and I didn’t even comprehend it. Now there’s all this confusion, all this hassle. Why are we so careless? Why will we take every little thing with no consideration?
In my interpretation, I’m tempted to see a lesson in holding on to things more tightly, in keeping higher track, in cherishing harder. But after I asked my friend who lost her phone in regards to the experience, she described two hours of panic. The subsequent morning, though, the sensation had vanished. “I made a decision that if anyone desired to get in contact with me, they might wait. That I could get in every single place I needed to, that I actually had every little thing I needed,” she said.
Oh! In fact! Impermanence! I at all times forget. The Buddhist author Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I do know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already broken. The phone and wallet are already lost. We have now every little thing we’d like. The things we’re afraid of losing are already gone.
Knowing this doesn’t keep the phobia from setting in each time I believe I’ve left my phone in a cab. But within the quiet moments after I’m calmer, I’m attempting to meditate on the things I’m holding too tightly, to loosen my grip a bit, to hold a bit more calmly the teacup, the wallet or phone, the people and places and concepts I’m clutching, as if clutching will keep them from vanishing.
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