Lost & Found

Lost & Found

Oh, those school day memories of loosing your stuff and going to the “lost and found.”  A definite place, usually located in the central office to reap sufficient embarrassment so you did not loose things again!  The New Yorker had a cartoon in which a perplexed wife looks at her husband and exclaims:  “Why is it that men only loose things that women can find?”  Maybe that’s why they invented the “car finder.”  Does a day go by when we don’t push the little button to find our cares that we loose?  Maybe we pay less attention to where we park because we now have these little devices.   

I wonder if our society has become so crowded with people and complex in its inter-workings that we ourselves feel misplaced?  Think about this.  We have so many things to live with, I wonder if we have forgotten who we are and what we live for?  In fact, life is said to be a never-ending race of getting and consuming.  In the end, the popular saying goes, the winner is the one who dies with the most toys.  

TS Eliot penned a poem with a title that describes it:  “The Hollow Men.”   The theme says that we reach outside of ourselves to get things, we hollow out inside.  Things cannot feed the character or spirit or soul or whatever the human essence is.  In fact, we are fed in an opposite process.  As we give ourselves away to something or someone, we find who we really are inside.  

“When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside,” writes Rabbi Harold Kushner, “It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel.”  

Let us dare to add, and we find who ought to be.  Anytime we feel like we have misplaced ourselves, we begin anew by stepping out and caring beyond ourselves.