Lost and Found

I lost my keys last week. For four days I searched everywhere - under every bed in the house, under every chair, sofa and recliner. I pulled out all the seat cushions, felt around in dark places - under bureaus and behind desks, even in some garbage bags. I worked myself up to a frenzy – jumping out of bed at night when I had a vision of where my keys might be, only to return to the cold mattress, empty handed.

In my frustration, I finally offered up a reward of $20 to anyone who found my keys. Before the reward was posted, no one bothered to help me. Now, with the promise of a mere $20 bill, everyone was getting into the search effort. Suddenly they were scurrying about as I heard the opening and closing of drawers and closet doors, rustling of papers, lifting and pushing things off of table tops.

Then the courtroom interrogation began:

"When did you see them last?" If I knew the answer to that, they wouldn't be lost.

"When did you last use them?" On December 23rd. I remember I drove home that day, so I had to have them to get into the house.

"Where did you put them after you walked into the house?" If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!

They were legitimate questions, and ones I had asked myself already, but my brain was not making the connection between when I last had the keys and when I realized that I didn’t.

When so much of a day is routine, you don’t pay attention to details. Our repetitive actions form little ruts that grow into paths and, over time, become trails that we follow day in and day out. Sometimes I’ll be driving - working out a problem in my head or thinking about a report that I was working on - and I will pull into my driveway and I don’t even remember the drive home. I don’t remember a single song that was playing on the ride home. Did I have the radio on?

I asked for a whistling tea pot for Christmas this year, because often I’ll put up a pot of water for tea, walk upstairs for something, start working on my computer, get distracted and lose track of time. When I finally go back downstairs, the kitchen has become a steam bath and I think, Oh, right; the tea!

A holiday like Christmas can throw a life of routines into chaos. Furniture is rearranged to make room for a tree, so my mindless path through the house is disrupted and I'm bumping into walls and tripping over wooden soldiers in my way. There’s a basket holding Christmas cards where the key plate used to be, and a tin of cookies is sitting on top of two days worth of mail, so the mindless act of placing your keys down where they usually go becomes an exercise in mental acuity for four days. Where is the Cablevision bill? Was the mortgage paid yet?

The interesting thing that happened, and what eventually led me to find my keys, was that I was forced to rewind the events of the past four days and examine every detail. What I found most distressing was that, in trying to remember the details of a day, I realized that most of the time I was not paying attention. I was moving on auto-pilot, following my trail, going through the motions of a day and not remembering anything about it.

Losing my keys forced me to wake up and pay attention. At first, I couldn’t remember anything about the past four days. What did I cook for dinner last night? Then, slowly, I began to remember some details – bits of conversation; what people were wearing on Christmas day; the seating arrangement at Christmas dinner; the smell of my son’s cologne when I kissed his cheek in mass on Christmas Eve . I went back another day and began to remember seeing the keys somewhere in the kitchen, but where? I saw myself opening a drawer, cleaning off the counter, moving things off a table to make room for some Christmas decorations.

Reviewing my life over the past four days was like seeing myself floating through a misty dream sequence. I stopped physically searching for the keys and spent my time mentally searching, working my mind harder, trying to see the details in action, as if I was viewing myself in a movie.

Then, finally, one evening while I was lying in bed in that twilight state between the real world and the world of dreams, when the mind is perfectly clear and empty of all thought, I sensed where the keys were. I didn’t bother to jump out of bed to verify my vision because I knew they would be there.

“Ah!” I said the next morning, as I grabbed the keys in my hand and held them up in the air like a prize. Suddenly, all the details that were missing came flooding into my brain and all the empty synapses were ignited and the paths were connected with the memories that were temporarily lost.

This mental exercise of trying to remember a mindless action taken out of a repetitive routine was a wake up call for me. I began to think about all the lost memories that accumulate in a lifetime and how much richer a life would be if we just paid more attention to the details.

So my one and only New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to be more mindful - to pay attention, to wake up! and walk through my day aware of my surroundings, to use all my senses and see my world anew. At the end of the day, I want to remember the details.

I also found a clip that I can attach to a ring on my purse handle so I’ll never misplace my keys, and, yes, I did get the whistling tea pot.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!