Lost & Found

One day I walked down the street in late afternoon light, and I felt the rough stones under my feet like little rising bread loaves. I smiled inside somewhere, even though outside I was beginning to feel the new chill in the air, and my past seemed both large and empty. How could that be? I thought. I’ve lived 54 years, with a wife once, and a young son. He must be 12? I haven’t seen either of them in so long, I’ve almost forgotten their mannerisms, their ways. I wonder if they are happy.

I had spent so many years inside, in that office full of piles of paper, paint faded and beginning to peel. I almost forgot why we were doing what we were doing. Filing court orders, filing official notices, recording liens in different languages. Why did this seem so important?

Always, we choose to climb stairs and enter doorways, to walk down one street rather than another. The motionless sense of time passing you by is a strange sensation. All of this would make sense if all I have seen were true! The passing of windows, cars moving slowly by, the way rain falls on the cobblestones and bricks, leaving slick patches and reflecting puddles. We watch ourselves, don’t we? What do we see?

Socrates may have said Forgetting is just losing knowledge. Where do we put it when we lose it? Plato wondered what it meant to remember. Who first used the phrase, “hidden in plain sight”? I’ve been known to lose things. I hear myself saying, It drives me crazy when I can’t find something! When something is “found,” does this mean it was lost? “Lost” at times has implied hopeless. “Lost forever.” “I lost the feeling in my leg.” How do I find it again? Is it hopeless? This thought clings to loneliness and solitude and denies the power of each generating energy cell of life. We are humans together, creations in the image of creators. Are our thoughts extinct? Genetically engineered? Or do we know our power, and “it must be here somewhere.” What creates reflections from the puddles in the street? Who made the car I pass in whose window I am reflected? Why is the car parked here, and for how long? Energy is real. I touch the metal, feel the rain, take in air, and expel. Energy pulses. Energy plays, dances, creates, moves, changes, expands. There is nothing stale about creation. Remember?