:: not a failing, a find ::
One of my most annoying failings is I lose track of important items, and then have trouble accounting for where I might have left them, meaning "lost or stolen?" remains an open question. My dad understood how annoying to oneself and others this not being "on the ball" could get to be, and he reminded me to "stay on the ball" from time to time.
Given how often I lose my prized things, I waste a lot of time obsessively looking for them, often to no avail. The etymology of the pejorative "loser" is obvious: one who loses. Losing is a symptom of ineffective self disciplines, which may come across as, and may be, self indulgence. Indeed, on a world scale I have my share of treasures and should not take them for granted. I work on those disciplines, and for long periods I've known relatively better success rates.
A way to compensate for a tendency to lose is to quickly save a copy or image somewhere. Document the existence of items. Keep those documents at least.
I've focused on losing in this blog post, however a tendency to break things, or not fix things in need of repair, might serve as material for additional exciting Failings episodes.
I forgot Dick Pugh was giving an excellent and well attended talk on meteors tonight at Wanderers, and was thinking to process my frustration a bit. Finding that psychotherapy venue temporarily well occupied, I turned to the old fashioned dear diary format. What's a journal for if not for Failings?
Quakers have had committees for Sufferings, and express Joys and Concerns. But Committees for Failings? Perhaps we could focus on those sometimes. However we don't want to turn ourselves into some commune based on various forms of public humiliation and shaming. Those patterns have been tried and found to not work over the long haul.
Even while writing this I managed to temporarily lose, then find, two important items. At least I still have the camera and cell phone, for the time being.
By best guess is the Samsung Galaxy 10.1" tablet got swiped from the back seat of an unlocked car a couple days ago and I'm just noticing. I promise to confess here if I find it after all, or if it's returned (unlikely).
In the meantime, check out the wonderful find Glenn shared with me this morning, a book about making patterns with thread in a cylinder, used in the 1960s at some alternative ("underground") school in New Mexico.
Click the picture to get into the Photostream for more.
OK, after visiting The Bagdad and asking them to check lost and found, the stuff appeared, both the hat and the tablet, on a dining room chair tucked under the table.
