I’m wondering where something went to.

Perhaps it is a marker of age, and perhaps everyone reaches this point at one time or another.

But I’m wondering where it went.

First off, my sense of security is all sorts of lost. I have given up on finding it anytime soon, kind of like when I lost my favorite pocket knife- I was sure it would turn up, but there was no real reason in looking after I had exhausted all the places it should be. I could always buy another knife. My sense of safety and security? I don’t think my line of work will allow me to afford another one of those anytime soon.

Second, my sense of recognition. I feel like I am wandering a landscape which *should* be familiar but in which I keep getting lost. I know every inch of the trail home, but I hardly get started before I realize I am completely turned around, have no clear idea how to get home, and no point of reference to get me back to where I started.

Third (and by no means last) my sense of reality. Am I really seeing the same things as everyone else? Did I actually hear those words correctly, or do I need to check my temperature for a raging, hallucinogenic fever? How can what I see and hear be so completely contrary to the interpretations of the same events through different eyes? I mean, we all see things through the fog of our own experience, but for fuck’s sake, this is just silly.

Then a moment of clarity.

A post on FBook by a distant friend. He calls his wife on their anniversary. He sits at work, a theater job that he loves but which is mostly closed due to covid. They discuss supper- where he should stop to pick some up on the way home, the kids need to eat something so will pizza do, and shouldn’t they still do something special ‘cuz of the day, you know? What he is truly saying was how amazing it is to love his work. He basks in the reality of being married to an amazing woman. He keenly feels the presence of his children, somewhere behind the phone, waiting for him to come home.

So why can’t we recognize that these are the things that move each and every one of us? Security in family. Recognition of one’s home. A sense of value and worth to tie it all down in reality. Maybe we don’t have all three, maybe the feeling of lack or loss of one or all of them distorts our view. But at the end of the day we really are all looking for the same things.

Too bad in our world we have forgotten how to walk the trail that leads us there.