Finders Keepers

Recently, right before my son moved out to his new adult life, I lost two “good” pieces of jewelry on two separate occasions.  Now these weren’t “insurable” items or family heirlooms, but they weren’t Forever 21 clearance items either. (Now on an aside, I love all of my jewelry and much like one of my favorite fashion icons, Iris Apfel, a 97 year old fashion maven, I might even like some of my faux pieces better than my real pieces.)  Anyway, I was driven to distraction trying to find these items.  Unfortunately, in the process of looking for the jewelry, I did not find the pieces I was looking for, but what I did find was a whole herd of dust bunnies and several items that should have been donated to Goodwill eons ago.

Now, I’m always looking for the meaning of “why things happen”.  I was incredibly intent of finding the jewelry and I had such a laser focus on that intent that it certainly kept me from thinking about the idea that my son was leaving our nest, never to return to it again, as a child.  It was certainly easier to vent all of my frustration on the helplessness of not knowing where the jewelry had gone to, then to face my intense feelings of loss of the only structure that our nucleus family had ever known.  I was also admonishing myself for my carelessness for not appreciating my items like I should have and perhaps even taking them for granted.  Did I wear them as many times as I could have or did I assume they would always be available to me whenever I wanted them to be?  You see where these analogies are going.

My Catholic friends have always suggested to turn to St. Anthony to ask for his help to intercede with God when you lose items.  Now, I’m not Catholic so I had to Google the appropriate way to officially ask for St. Anthony’s help.  I looked up the prayer and it essentially said something to the affect of please help me to find my items, but if it is not God’s will to find the items, please give me total peace with that fact.  Now, in my desperation, I was wondering if it was okay to cross out the last part of the prayer, because in my mind, the only way I was going to have peace was if I found my jewelry.  Nonetheless, I prayed the whole prayer and I did not find my jewelry.  And I did not find peace right away, but surprisingly, I came to peace about the losses much more quickly than I thought I would.  Sometimes I Thank God for Unanswered Prayers has always been one of my favorite country songs and I think it applies here.

I often lecture my family about the dangers of getting too attached to “things.”  “We are not even going to leave this world with our bodies!” is a statement I’ve been known to say more than a few times.  For the record, that goes over like a lead balloon.  Thanks, Debbie Downer, any other uplifting anecdotes you’d like to pass on while we eat our dessert???  The truth is, I haven’t found a better way to say it, but the “things” in life are temporary and fleeting.  Change is always happening and the suffering occurs when we can’t make peace with this fact.  A lot of spiritual teachers (and marketing experts, for that matter) like to say that when we want something or someone, it’s not really the item that we want, it is the feeling that we believe we will get if we possess that thing.  I believed that I would feel extreme “relief” if I found my jewelry and obviously, I was looking for “relief” from a lot of the tumult that was swirling around in my heart.  And a lot of that tumult had nothing to do with my jewelry.

Native Americans were very thankful to the buffalo that they consumed.  They used every part of the buffalo and thanked it profusely for it’s blessing and it’s sacrifice.  Marie Kondo, the Japanese organization guru says that when you know that it is time to give up an item, you thank it for what it has brought to you and ask it to bless someone else.  I am thankful for my jewelry, for the times I felt lovely wearing the pieces, but I think I may even be more thankful for the loss of the items, because the lessons I gleaned from the losses will stay with me forever.  I hope that wherever they are now, they are blessing someone else in all of the best ways possible.