Lost and Found

As I look out towards the water with the breeze in my backyard rustling the palm trees, in the comfort of my lost and found cotton jumper, I am truly enjoying the blessings of being home. I lost my iphone yesterday I am pretty sure. I have no event to explain this loss, and all logical routes of finding this lost phone seem to have been exhausted. Yet, I have some faith it’ll turn back up when it wants to – and that the Universe has chosen to help me lose my phone so that I can grow personally during this phone-less solitude period.

I recently found this cutesy floral jumper I had searched for from time to time and wondered about in the past year. All logical routes told me that this jumper was at home – but I had no way of knowing if we would ever reunite. And reunite we did – the contentment of finding this lost piece of clothing was so deeply touching for me, especially because I recently also found a diamond ring I had no hope of ever seeing again. This was a ring given to me by my mother on my 22^nd birthday, and despite my sadness and disappointment in having lost it ; I grieved, shared the memory with friends, and just moved along, accepting that loss.

So, imagine the gratitude and pleasure I feel as I see my hands typing with this beautiful piece of love and ring that my mom gave me back on my older yet familiar hands.

These recent losses and new findings got me thinking about things lost and found. I was once so deeply longing the return of my lost yellow ipod with a special engraving on the back (referred to in an older blog post) that I had thought of starting a business that collects the communities lost and found items and returns to people what they have lost. I ended up not taking the business idea any further because for one, I thought it cost-wise inefficient, and secondly, I felt there was a lesson about letting go that this business would not support. I realized that the demand and supply of such a business, while noble in its recognition, of sentimental (and monetary) attachment towards things lost, catered more to people’s need of recovering something lost. Somehow, a culture that craved for and ran after and relied on things being found and recovered easily did not gel with me too much.

We lost something. What’s the lesson? Why did I lose it? Was I not careful with it? Do I even care to have it back? How much am I willing to look for it? When will I know if it is okay to stop searching for it? How long will I brood and grieve for it? How will I move on from it? Will I still have hope? What will happen if I do run into it again? Will I like it the same if it ever came back – or will I have outgrown the jumper? Would I replace it? How would I feel if it turned up after I have already replaced it?

Among all of these interesting questions and possibilities of how things could turn out in the twists and turns of life, I found most deep solace in the fact that I remembered the loss of my ring, the jumper – I remembered that I missed them  because I really could never replace them. I also remembered deeply wishing to get them back yet being thankful to have had them in the first place. I smile now at how I did put my best efforts in finding/recovering it. I smile at my fluctuating yet still epsilon amount of dormant remaining hope that these things could turn back up again, with the faith that if they didn’t, my life would remain just as beautiful because they had been in it.

P.S. I found my iphone in less than a week, and am currently using it (01/17/2015); someone turned it into the AT&T store - the same store where I had once lost a previous iphone in love. I wanted to post a picture of the note in the laundry room of my complex that I saw a whole two weeks after I had lost and found the phone, which described my phone and was asking for the owner of the phone to come forth and claim it. I saw this note a couple times but did not my phone on me with which to take a picture. The note was no longer there by the time I brought in my phone to take a picture to accompany this post. Hashtag: timing.