Lost and Found

This week my boss asked me to send an email out to all the PhD students about the department's "lost and found".  The Psychology Department at UC Berkeley actually has a lost and found.  It is located in such and such a place.  I let the students know that the lost and found may contain items going back several years.  So if they had lost something at some point, they may want to check it out.  If a student hadn’t lost anything, then it would not make sense to check out the lost and found.  The lost and found, for me, conjures up an image of a wooden box in a Kindergarten classroom with lots of single shoes and socks and toys and books.  Probably one sock is hanging over the edge; it is a Spiderman sock.  The lost and found conjures up a time when loosing things was much more common.  Kindergarteners, who are people too, lose things at a much more frequent rate than adults.  However, adults also lose things, hence the need for a lost and found in the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley.

But sometimes adults lose things that don't fit in the small, wooden lost and found box.  Sometimes we lose things that are alive with a fleshy, muscular heart pumping blood through veins and arteries.  We lose people.  We lose people who play a major role in our lives for a length of time but now are gone.  And we are left with an empty box.  And although an empty box creates sadness, if we remember that the lost and found is not called the lost box but the lost and found box, we know that the box will be full again and we will be found by another person who will bring a different joy to our life.

This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)


with affection,
Anthony