A pair months in the past, a pal of mine misplaced her telephone. The following day, one other pal misplaced his pockets. These items weren’t simply misplaced; they didn’t floor the subsequent day. They hadn’t slid out of a pocket and down between the sofa cushions solely to be discovered whereas tidying the home. The telephone and pockets disappeared and didn’t come again. They appeared properly and really misplaced.
We misplace issues on a regular basis. “Keys, telephone, pockets,” I repeat as a mantra earlier than I depart the home, the workplace, the bar, patting my pockets to verify we’re intact. We’ve all skilled that “Oh no, the place’s my …” feeling. We’re certain we misplaced some important merchandise and are hit with a sense of doom so intense, it’s nearly breathtaking. Then, simply as rapidly, that beautiful wash of aid once you discover that your telephone is, the truth is, within the pocket of your coat — false alarm, disaster averted. You’re, for a second, a modified particular person, an individual who glimpsed the horror of getting to name the D.M.V., and you bought a last-minute reprieve. You’ll maintain higher observe of your stuff any more. You by no means wish to really feel that approach once more.
Misplacing stuff after which discovering it’s on a regular basis nonsense. Shedding issues is rarer. The truth that two good pals misplaced essential issues back-to-back appeared bizarre, like a selected sort of unhealthy luck had zeroed in on my social circle. Somebody sensible as soon as suggested me that when issues appear unusual or complicated or too symbolically weighty, we would ask ourselves, “How would I interpret this if it have been a dream?” It places a ways between us and what’s occurring. What if I had a dream through which folks in my life stored dropping their issues? How would I interpret that?
“Lose one thing each day. Settle for the fluster / of misplaced door keys, the hour badly spent. / The artwork of dropping isn’t laborious to grasp,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “One Artwork.” The poem begins by discussing the lack of inconsequential issues like keys, then strikes on to greater losses: “three liked homes,” “two rivers, a continent,” “even dropping you.” Small losses put together you for large ones.
Within the dream through which my pals maintain dropping seemingly insignificant issues, I see symbols. The pockets and the telephone are boring necessities, the untreasured, unremarked-upon instruments of dwelling that we take as a right till we lose them. Then their import comes into brilliant focus: What was even in my pockets? License, bank cards, so many receipts. Was there a present card that I’ll by no means get again? Issues have been really easy earlier than and I didn’t even realize it. Now there’s all this confusion, all this trouble. Why are we so careless? Why can we take every little thing as a right?
In my interpretation, I’m tempted to see a lesson in holding on to issues extra tightly, in maintaining higher observe, in cherishing more durable. However once I requested my pal who misplaced her telephone concerning the expertise, she described two hours of panic. The following morning, although, the sensation had vanished. “I made a decision that if anybody needed to get in contact with me, they might wait. That I may get all over the place I wanted to, that I truly had every little thing I wanted,” she mentioned.
Oh! After all! Impermanence! I all the time neglect. The Buddhist author Jack Kornfield wrote of his instructor holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already damaged. As a result of I do know its destiny, I can get pleasure from it absolutely right here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already damaged. The telephone and pockets are already misplaced. We have now every little thing we want. The issues we’re afraid of dropping are already gone.
Figuring out this doesn’t maintain the phobia from setting in each time I feel I’ve left my telephone in a cab. However within the quiet moments once I’m calmer, I’m making an attempt to meditate on the issues I’m holding too tightly, to loosen my grip a bit, to hold a bit extra flippantly the teacup, the pockets or telephone, the folks and locations and concepts I’m clutching, as if clutching will maintain them from vanishing.
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