The Joy of Finding

The Joy of Finding

At the recommendation of a friend I read a New Yorker article recently – When Things, Go Missing, by Kathryn Schulz.  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/when-things-go-missing   Give it a read.  In it the author writes on two kinds of loss, loss of things (misplaced keys, jewelry, etc.) and loss of people (death).  While both are, in our language, considered a loss, in this article, the former, loss of things, is labeled as “disappearance,” while the latter, the loss of people, is labeled as “loss.”  The distinction makes both physical and metaphysical sense.  While my keys are “lost” in the sense that I can’t find them, they still exist and are fully functional.  If someone else finds them they can use them to start and drive off in my truck.  My lost cell phone did not vaporize, it exists, I just don’t know WHERE it exists.  If someone finds the $20 bill I dropped, it spends for them as well as it would have for me.  Schulz puts it better than I can:

“With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.” [To set theological arguments aside here, I’ll simply add “…on this earth” after “found” here.]

In the end, and though it would be impossible to do so while I am in the midst of looking for/mourning the “disappearance” of my keys, lost phone, or that $20 bill, Schulz convinces me that “disappearances” can, if I let them, be a blessing, because they can remind me of the transience of life.  These “disappearances” along the way can prepare me for and help diminish (though not prevent) the sting of real “loss.”  The key, she notes, if to recognize that the blessing is in the finding:

“[W]e will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.”

Indeed, “it is the finding that is astonishing.”  Schulz notes that if I let it, disappearance reminds me to notice the world around me, to count my blessings.  These “disappearances” can “serve as a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.”  Schulz closes with these beautiful words: “[O]ur 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 “  Amen.