LOST & FOUND

By Aidan Donnelley Rowley
Ivy League Insecurities


http://www.ivyleagueinsecurities.com/



I remember that long wooden box in the locker room. Never quite closed. Contents always spilling out. A sleeve. A sock. Smells escaping. Bits and pieces of stories.



The Lost & Found.


Every now and then, I would rifle through it before basketball practice if I forgot a t-shirt or a pair of shorts. I’d pry open that lid and look through all those things lost and left behind. I wondered if these things would ever be found. Or whether they would just sit there waiting.

Now I am an adult. In the locker room that is life. And I realize that the Lost & Found isn’t just a box. It is everywhere. Each of us is lost. Looking. Left behind. Each of us is a remnant from another time, a simpler time. Left here now. Waiting, always waiting, to be found.

Emerson, wise Emerson once said, “How much of human life is lost in waiting.” And how right he was. In being who we are, in being lost, in the mere act and art of waiting, we are losing time, we are losing life, we are losing ourselves.

But we wait. We have no choice. We wait, strewn, crumpled, smelly. For someone to find us. To scoop us up and save us. To take us away. To a warm place. To a safe place.

We wait to be found. But as we wait, lost and losing, we wonder what it means to be found. Whether it is possible. Whether being lost is life and being found is fiction.