I often misplace. I set down, without thinking, objects and sometimes even thoughts.
There are times you reach into your pocket and, finding nothing, feel as though you’ve done so only for purposes of a gut punch. A sought object no longer in your possession, and no accounting for where it is. Racking your memory in a pressing moment, you face the prospect of complete loss. What a relief it is, then, to definitively confirm it did not leave the room or house in question.
This reflection brings peace when applied more broadly in life. I have not lost the complete assurance in my fate I had when I was a youth. How do I know this? Because (perhaps sadly) I never took it out into the world! Wherever it may be (and it’s been a long time since I last saw it), it must, by extension, still be somewhere within me.
That I have preserved something essential within me through misplacement constitutes an important life discovery, though not the decisive one. We may live years yet with the most essential aspect of our being misplaced in a beating heart.
Complete belief still exists somewhere within, ready to be recovered by a later stage of life, one where it is destined to match better. Better, that is, than with the 20-year-old biking from the university library to band practice, feeling himself bound to an absolute, destined fate.
Oh, it was a practice at my Tucson home, an early band that never ended up playing a show together!
The 20-year-old is gone, the bike he was riding later had both its tires stolen, never to be replaced, and yet the animating thought on the bike ride home (this “thought” better described as absolute faith in a certain fate), never having actually been brought into the world, remains somewhere misplaced within!
Suddenly, how overcome with assurance I am that I will recover an amplified version of this very feeling!