A couple months ago, a friend of mine lost her phone. The next day, another friend lost his wallet. These things weren’t just misplaced; they didn’t surface the next day. They hadn’t slid out of a pocket and down between the couch cushions only to be found while tidying the house. The phone and wallet disappeared and didn’t come back. They seemed well and truly lost.
We misplace things all the time. “Keys, phone, wallet,” I repeat as a mantra before I leave the house, the office, the bar, patting my pockets to make sure 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 feeling of doom so intense, it’s almost breathtaking. Then, just as quickly, that exquisite wash of relief when you find that your phone is, in fact, in the pocket of your coat — false alarm, crisis averted. You are, for a moment, a changed person, a person who glimpsed the horror of having to call the D.M.V., and you got a last-minute reprieve. You’ll keep better track of your stuff from now on. You never want to feel that way again.
Misplacing stuff and then finding it is everyday nonsense. Losing things is rarer. The fact that two good friends lost important things back-to-back seemed weird, like a particular type of bad luck had zeroed in on my social circle. Someone wise once advised me that when things seem strange or confusing or too symbolically weighty, we might ask ourselves, “How would I interpret this if it were a dream?” It puts some distance between us and what’s happening. What if I had a dream in which people in my life kept losing their things? How would I interpret that?
“Lose something every day. 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 loss of inconsequential things like keys, then moves on to bigger losses: “three loved houses,” “two rivers, a continent,” “even losing you.” Small losses prepare you for big ones.
In the dream in 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 for granted until we lose them. Then their import comes into bright focus: What was even in my wallet? License, credit cards, so many receipts. Was there a gift card that I’ll never get back? Things were so easy before and I didn’t even know it. Now there’s all this confusion, all this hassle. Why are we so careless? Why do we take everything for granted?
In my interpretation, I am tempted to see a lesson in holding on to things more tightly, in keeping better track, in cherishing harder. But when I asked my friend who lost her phone about the experience, she described two hours of panic. The next morning, though, the feeling had vanished. “I decided that if anyone wanted to get in touch with me, they could wait. That I could get everywhere I needed to, that I actually had everything I needed,” she said.
Oh! Of course! Impermanence! I always forget. The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I 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 everything we need. The things we’re afraid of losing are already gone.
Knowing this doesn’t keep the terror from setting in every time I think I’ve left my phone in a cab. But in the quiet moments when I’m calmer, I’m trying to meditate on the things I’m holding too tightly, to loosen my grip a little, to carry a little more lightly the teacup, the wallet or phone, the people and places and ideas I’m clutching, as if clutching will keep them from vanishing.
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