Tonight, as I was coming back to my writing practice, I suddenly realized that I am missing the MP3 player I use to listen to soothing sounds of rain. And I wondered what could possibly have happened to it? My thoughts conjure up different scenarios: accidentally put in the laundry, dropped down the toilet, hidden in a sock drawer, stashed under the bed. I try to think of all the crafty ways I might have concealed the thing to myself, or the unconscious motives for doing so. Unfortunately, it had been hooked up to my very small ear buds, which makes it all the harder to find. And it seems to be a spur for me to go on a hunt and reorganize all the things in my apartment.
What is it about missing things that spurs the spiritual quest? I remember an old parable I had read years ago in a Buddhist text about how a person loses his keys and starts to look under the light, even though it's likely that the keys were lost somewhere else. When asked why he is looking there and not somewhere else, the man replies, "the light is better here". I am not too sure what the meaning of this story is, but I think it refers to 'losing something' (and finding it) as more than the object itself. Losing a simple thing can trigger a whole lot of doubts that relate to who we are. How often has a person lost something and repeatedly gone to the same places over again to 'double check' if it's there or not? The longer I lose something without finding it, the more my mind searches for places that contain a smidgeon of certainty, almost like the 'better light' of the man searching for his keys. But in the end, the quest only devolves into a kind of hankering after the familiar, the comforting, or the habits that make people feel safe and secure. If I cannot find the missing object that makes me whole, at least I can engage in a healing or comforting ritual that features things and actions familiar to me.
It also explains why, in times of loss, I often crave after things that are routine and habitual. There is a mind tendency there, almost a kind of search to reassure myself through a process of doing, even if the process itself is actually quite useless. One time, thinking I had lost a library book, I went back to the library to look for the shelf where I had originally found that book, thinking perhaps it had been returned after all (or perhaps not properly scanned before going back to the shelf). Of course, the action was completely futile, and I ended up finding the book at home (mis-shelved, again!) but the point is that 'doing something' made me feel better. It somehow assured me that I had covered all the bases and even empowered me in some ways, even though the result was the same in the end.
Of course, the 'object lesson' (pardon the pun) of all of this is quite pragmatic: I need to be more aware and organized when it comes to the things I own and borrow. But moments of loss, forgetting, missing something, are also trainings in dealing with the more significant losses of life, such as health, family, friends or even employment. These mini-losses can help a person to observe and understand what a person does, but it can also show how losses don't necessarily end our lives--they only change life, make it perhaps bumpier or less predictable than usual. And these mini-losses are also training in realizing that a lot of things are beyond one's control, but some things are. If I keep my life simple and don't have so much mental clutter, I may be able to be more effective in handling the things I own. On the other hand, if I am fussing over speculative areas of 'what if' or "I wish I could go back and salvage this", that becomes something to agitate the mind. Sometimes losses can help people to simplify themselves a bit, become less burdened and more careful of their things. Certainly it can be an encouragement to improve. And on the other hand, it's important not to get so attached to things that one is always blaming her or himself or even hankering after the lost things.
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