There you are, you slippery bastard.
Elizabeth Bishop tells us —
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
I’m having that day where I lose my coffee cup 37 times.
That’s a good place to start, though. It gives me at least 37 chances to rejoice. 37 chances to grow new dendrites. 37 chances to establish a network in my brain called Joyous Response to Simple Victories.
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
File “coffee cups” under that heading.
I’ve written at least a couple dozen blog posts on The Art of Losing before this one. Threw out most of them. Kinda hard to write a blog about loss day after day, even if it is supposed to be about the upside of loss. Like, “let’s start with the time Doug died” or “that time your house burned down” is fine if in the long run it led to something good.
It all does. At least that’s my argument, my mantra: all of life is a miracle, even the shitty parts. (I thought I was really smart for having come up with that until I found out that Albert Einstein beat me to it.)
Still, to be able to trace the path that led to the good part, I have to go back to the morning when I read “Doug passed peacefully this last night”, or the night when I woke up to see a flicker reflected in Kenny Kott’s glasses and heard him say “something’s burning”.
Going back there takes me out of the present moment, obviously. And I really like being in the present moment. The past can be like a shitty movie. The final print is never going to change. There’s no director’s cut. The future is like at electric fence hidden by tall grass. The grass may look cool and inviting, but you never know what you’re going to walk into. Or pee on.
Once I found the present moment, it became like Vacation Spot USA for me. It’s a place of calmness, of clarity; of hope, engagement, curiosity, positive anticipation – even excitement. You know, like an awesome water park where they don’t allow kids. Like a killer ski run that I have all to myself. I want to go to there and stay to there.
And then I lose my goddamn coffee cup again. Glory.
OK well, at least I did the thing where I turned off the Automatic Backstory Generator, the thing that’s the awful YouTube pre-roll ad from the Most Insulting Part of My Subconscious. Jesus Christ, if you’d’a cleaned house maybe you could find something that’s the size of a brindle calf in this dump. Better rent a backhoe, or better yet, just drop a goddamn match and cut your losses.
Yeah. Really glad I turned that thing off.
Super duper cool thing that I learned about the brain: You can encourage the growth of new dendrites just by using your powers of concentration and a lot of practice.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I’ll look up the research later and throw a link in here — or maybe in a future post, but for now here’s the layperson’s directions:
When something good happens, I hold on to the feeling it gives me for twenty seconds. I even count backwards in my mind while I’m clamped onto the goodness. It’s not easy. It’s like the patting your head while rubbing your tummy thing. It takes practice. But it can be done.
Do that enough and the brain will establish new neural pathways that respond to joy, even simple joys, like finding a coffee cup for the 37th time in a single morning.
Or finding a letter from Doug.