Missing

Have you ever misplaced something? Go ahead, confess...I know you have. Me too. Sometimes its mildly aggrevating and then sometimes downright annoying. And if you don’t find it frustration comes in too. I go crazy when I can’t find something. I search all the obvious places first remembering the last time I used it. And the search goes on...and on. Sometimes the misplaced object doesn’t get found for hours or days. And then, in the most unexplained place, it shows up. 

  We joke in our house that the Future People come and take the item to display in the future museum. Then they bring it back. Haven’t you ever looked for something you know should be in a certain place but it wasn’t there? You search that place multiple times to no avail. And then later you go back and search it again and right there, in a place you couldn’t have missed it, is the object. Well, the Future people brought it back. In our family we have many stories of how something was missing but later shows up right in plain sight and you couldn’t have missed it in your searching. And then sometimes the Future People don’t put the object back correctly and it ends up in a strange place that it couldn’t have possibly be. Yep, that’s our theory anyway. 

No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.” —Kathryn Shulz, The New Yorker