Yesterday, on my way home from the coffee shop, I was listening to an excellent record (Hush by Slow Crush, if you must know). I was so engulfed by the music, in fact, that when I put down my bag to put on my jacket, I just kept walking. Away from my bag. With my laptop in it.
Five hours later, Freakout et al. strode into my brain. Or rather, it sprung, decapitated, from the attic hatch of my central nervous system and went BLEEHHHHHHHH, and the cells working dead-end jobs at my CNS screamed shrilly and threw papers in the air and ran every which way.
At 10pm, I went knocking on neighbors’ doors, to no avail. It turns out that, even in Los Altos, a free laptop on the side of the road is still a free laptop on the side of the road.
In case you haven’t noticed, I lose a lot of stuff. This year, I’m down my passport and a MacBook Air, and it’s not even April. Luckily for me, though, loss is a pretty deep pool of reflection. Nothing makes you think twice like losing an expensive thing in a dumb place (not to mention a person, but we’re keeping it mundane).
Whenever I lose something, my mind immediately goes to the minutiae that led to it getting lost. If I had just stayed at the coffee shop another minute, or taken a different route, or been listening to a different song… it’s amazing how many things had to go just the way they did for that thing to get lost.
It’s easy to ruminate on those infinite alternate possibilities. But the force that aligns tiny sequences so precisely isn’t just the force of loss. It’s the same force that led you to meet just that person, in just that place, at just that time, who you now love so much. It’s the same force that impulsed you to pick that one book off the shelf that changed how you see the world. It’s the same force that, every once in a while, also leads lost objects back to their owners.
Loss is just one face of a single, invisible serendipity that reminds us we’re not really in the driver’s seat.
It’s the Universe’s way of reminding us it’s still there.
And man, is it weird.
It is wonderful and shocking how our tireless efforts to arrange our lives pale in comparison to things completely out of our control. Often, the biggest events of our lives are determined by forces that aren’t even in the realm of possible knowledge.
That can be scary. And maybe that’s why we’re neurotic.
How often does our neuroticism do us any good? If the answer is ‘almost never,’ why are we so governed by it? Maybe neuroticism is just a nice way of avoiding what loss brings us face-to-face with: we were never in control to begin with.
Which is not to say there aren’t concrete steps we can take to keep our lives organized. It is to say that even the most neurotically organized people are not insulated from loss. The miracles of lost and found bind us all.
In the absence of a laptop, I’m writing on this awesome guy:
I mean, seriously. It bluetooths right to your phone. You can take it anywhere. Best of all, no one will steal it, even if you leave it on the side of the road.
More adventures are coming soon to Lucas’ Blog. And, gods be good, not just adventures in loss. If the Universe keeps up this loss BS, I might just lie on the side of the road and see who picks me up.
Or, if I’m lucky, I’ll be on the side of the road, but with my feet under me and my thumb up in the air. Gimme what you got, O Force of Loss!
Until next time,
Lucas