Lost and Found
Not everything we lose can be put in a box
Introduction
A little while ago, I was at a soft play centre with my toddler granddaughter when she found treasure.
At least, that’s what it was to her.
Amongst all the noise, brightly coloured equipment and small children charging around with seemingly inexhaustible supplies of energy, she spotted a beautiful butterfly hair clip.
And, naturally, she immediately put it in her hair.
She loved it.
For a toddler, possession can be a fairly straightforward concept.
I found it.
I like it.
Therefore, presumably, it is mine.
Unfortunately, adulthood has complicated the rules somewhat.
So I explained to her that the butterfly belonged to another little girl.
Perhaps that little girl hadn’t even realised she’d lost it yet.
Maybe later she would.
She may become upset and tell her mummy, who might bring her all the way back to the soft play centre hoping somebody had handed it in.
I tried to explain something else to my granddaughter too:
Even the smallest things can mean a lot to someone else.
To us, it was simply a pretty butterfly hair clip we’d found on the floor.
To another little girl, it might have been her favourite.
A present.
Something she’d chosen herself.
Something her own grandmother had given her.
We couldn’t possibly know.
And because we couldn’t know, the right thing to do was to look after it for her.
So we took the little butterfly to the man at reception.
He told us he would put it in the lost-and-found box.
And that should really have been the end of the story.
Except that my mind has an irritating habit of refusing to leave perfectly ordinary things alone.
The Lost-and-Found Box
I started thinking about that box.
What must be in it?
Hair clips, probably.
Odd socks?
Water bottles?
Tiny toys?
Gloves that have become permanently separated from their partners.
Perhaps a child’s comforter causing considerably more distress in somebody’s house than its rather battered appearance would ever suggest.
And believe me, I know.
All sorts of apparently insignificant things waiting for somebody to realise they’re missing.
And suddenly lost and found seemed much bigger than lost property.
Because isn’t that what we spend quite a lot of our lives doing?
Losing things and finding things?
And I’m not talking about our keys.
Although I do plenty of that too.
We Lose People
Sometimes we lose people.
Through death, distance, disagreement.
Some simply because two lives that once travelled alongside one another gradually take different roads.
There are friendships we thought would last forever that somehow didn’t.
Relationships that once seemed unbreakable.
Family members who become estranged.
People we desperately want back, and others we eventually understand we needed to let go.
Occasionally, wonderfully, people find one another again.
An apology is made.
A message is sent.
A misunderstanding is finally understood.
Two people who have spent years standing stubbornly on opposite sides of something suddenly remember that they once loved each other.
Not everything can be repaired.
Nor should everything be.
But sometimes found doesn’t mean returning to exactly where we were.
Sometimes it means finding a new way of being together.
We Can Lose Ourselves
There are also periods when the thing we’ve lost is ourselves.
That sounds rather dramatic until you’ve experienced it.
We can become so consumed by being somebody’s mother, father, partner, carer, employee, or whatever else life requires of us, that one day we wonder where we went.
Life changes us; parenthood changes us; work changes us; relationships change us; grief changes us; age changes us, like I’ve written about here on Medium having turned 60.
Sometimes circumstances knock us so far away from the person we thought we were that we barely recognise ourselves.
But perhaps finding yourself isn’t about becoming the old you again.
Maybe that person no longer exists.
Perhaps it is about meeting the person you’ve become.
We Lose Dreams Too
Remember all those things you were definitely going to do?
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Before life intervened?
Some dreams disappear because we genuinely outgrow them.
Others get packed away beneath mortgages, children, jobs, caring responsibilities, lack of money, lack of confidence, or simply lack of time.
Then occasionally something happens.
We retire, as I have. The children grow up. A relationship ends. We move house. We meet somebody. We lose somebody. We turn an age that once sounded impossibly old (me again).
And one of those forgotten dreams quietly taps us on the shoulder.
Remember me?
Sometimes lost things aren’t gone.
They’re waiting.
And Sometimes We Find Things We Weren’t Looking For
This may be my favourite kind of finding.
A friendship you didn’t expect. A hobby you never imagined enjoying. A place that inexplicably feels like home. A new purpose after believing your useful years were behind you.
Maybe a different version of yourself.
Even happiness can creep back in when you weren’t paying attention.
We tend to imagine finding as the reversal of losing.
But it isn’t always.
Sometimes what we find is entirely new.
Some Things Really Are Better Together
All of this came from one tiny butterfly hair clip.
Which is probably rather a lot of philosophical responsibility to place upon a toddler’s lost accessory.
But the thought stayed with me.
I kept returning to the idea of lost and found, and particularly to the emotional distance between those two little words.
Lost can contain sadness, uncertainty, loneliness, regret and fear.
Found can contain relief, belonging, recognition, reconciliation and joy.
But there is something else between them.
The journey.
We tend to concentrate on the beginning and the ending.
We were lost.
Now we’re found.
But what happened in between?
How long did it take?
How many wrong turns were there?
How close did we come to giving up?
What did we learn on the way?
And perhaps finding something after having lost it can occasionally make us understand its value in a way we never did when it was simply there.
One Footprint at a Time
That thought eventually became the first print in a new collection I’ve created called Some Things Are Better Together.
The first design is, appropriately, Lost & Found.
At the beginning sits a little teddy bear, alone and entirely in black and white beneath the word LOST.
From him, a trail of individual footprints begins a long journey across a large expanse of white.
For most of the journey, the footprints remain grey.
Then, very gradually, colour begins to appear.
And at the other end is FOUND.
A little boy, now in full colour, has his teddy safely back in his arms.
I deliberately wanted the footprints to take the longer route.
Not a straight line from one to the other.
Because real journeys rarely work like that.
Finding our way back to a person, a dream, a sense of belonging — or ourselves — can take time.
Sometimes all we can manage is one footprint at a time.
I Hope She Came Back
I will probably never know what happened to the butterfly hair clip.
Maybe nobody claimed it.
Maybe its little owner never even noticed it was gone.
But I prefer another ending.
I like to imagine a little girl suddenly reaching for her hair and discovering an empty space.
Her mummy remembering the soft play centre.
The two of them returning.
A conversation at reception.
Someone opening the lost-and-found box.
And there it is.
Something very small that mattered very much.
Found.
And somewhere in all of that is perhaps the lesson I was trying to teach my granddaughter that day.
Things don’t have to matter to us in order to matter.
People don’t either.
What looks insignificant from where we’re standing may mean the world from where somebody else is standing.
So perhaps we should take a little more care with the things — and the people — we encounter along the way.
Because some things can be replaced.
Some things can’t.
Some things are better left behind.
And some things really are better together.
Thank you for reading. 😊
That little encounter with a butterfly hair clip helped inspire my new Some Things Are Better Together Collection.
The print explores the journey from separation to reunion through black and white gradually becoming colour — and the idea that finding our way back isn’t always a straight line (the print is slightly different to the image here).
You can access the Lost & Found print if you should wish to in my Etsy shop here: HolisticallyYours8.Etsy.com
Or if you would like to buy me a coffee, you are very welcome to do so on: https://ko-fi.com/justbeingme5
