Lost in Space
On why losing things is one of the greatest adventures
I lose things.
Not all the time, but often enough that I have developed a theory.
Most people assume that losing something is a mistake. An unfortunate collision between poor memory and bad organisation. You put the object down somewhere sensible, forget where that sensible place was, and then spend twenty minutes searching for it.
But I wonder if there is another way of looking at it.
What if losing something is the beginning of a game?
Not a game we consciously choose to play, perhaps, but a game nevertheless.
The object vanishes.
A puzzle appears.
The search begins.
The funny thing is that the search is often more interesting than the object itself.
I have spent half an hour looking for a misplaced cable and found an old photograph, a forgotten notebook, three useful tools and a receipt that finally solved a small mystery from six months ago.
The cable was almost an afterthought.
Perhaps that is the hidden value of losing things. They force us to explore territory we would otherwise ignore.
The Lost Coordinates
When something goes missing, it has not actually disappeared.
It still exists.
It occupies a location in the universe.
The problem is not that the object has vanished.
The problem is that we no longer know its coordinates.
The keys are somewhere.
The book is somewhere.
The glasses are usually much closer than we think.
The object remains stubbornly present while our knowledge of its location evaporates.
In that sense, losing something is not about the thing itself. It is about information.
We have misplaced a fact.
Hide and Seek
Children understand this better than adults.
Hide-and-seek is not really a game about hiding.
It is a game about finding.
The hiding simply creates the conditions necessary for discovery.
Without the search there is no game.
Without the uncertainty there is no excitement.
Treasure hunts work the same way. Stories work the same way. Detective novels, archaeological digs and missing-person mysteries all begin with an absence.
Something has gone.
Someone must find it.
Lost and Found
One of my favourite songs at the moment is Clannad’s I Will Find You.
I like the certainty of the title.
Not I Have Lost You.
Not Perhaps I Will Find You.
Simply:
I Will Find You.
The focus is not on the loss.
The focus is on the search.
The title assumes that what has been separated can be reunited. The journey may be long. The route may be unclear. But the story is moving towards discovery rather than disappearance.
The Search
Perhaps this explains why we find lost things so satisfying.
The object itself rarely changes.
The keys are still keys.
The glasses are still glasses.
The missing document is usually just as boring as it was before it vanished.
Yet finding it feels disproportionately rewarding.
We have solved a puzzle.
Restored a connection.
Recovered a fragment of the world that had slipped temporarily beyond the edge of our map.
A Universe of Lost Things
The more I think about it, the more it seems that much of human activity revolves around finding things.
Archaeologists search for lost cities.
Historians search for lost stories.
Scientists search for lost explanations.
Readers search for lost books.
Genealogists search for lost ancestors.
Even astronomers spend much of their time looking for things that are difficult to see.
Perhaps we are all participants in one giant game of hide-and-seek.
The universe hides things.
We go looking for them.
And every now and then, when we least expect it, we find them.
As I write this, a shed awaits.
Somewhere inside are things I’ve misplaced, things I’ve forgotten about and perhaps a few small treasures.
The tidy is really just an excuse to go looking.
I wonder what I’ll find.
I will pledge in near future.
I have found that it’s usually the rush to complete a task or project that we lose something. We may have committed to too much to get done, and in that haste, we have left something somewhere other than where it lives.
I do not usually lose things. I have a place where they live, and if not in my
hand, they are in their homes.
My husband loses his glasses, guitar picks, his keys, and even his wallet, sometimes more than once daily.
We have a key rack right at the front and back doors.
Bizarrely, I am the one to find the lost items and in the most unlikely of places.