Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The meaning of the Lost and Found

Martha believed that everything happened for a reason. Whose plan it was, she could not tell; she usually thought “fate” or “destiny”, not daring to make a higher mention. Sometimes good things happened and sometimes it was bad; but at least she slept peacefully, knowing that someone, somewhere, had a plan for her for the next day, let alone for the rest of her life.
And most of the time she was right: someone did have a plan for her on the day after. She worked in an administration and that person was her boss.
Martha could have spent the rest of her days like this, waiting for her fate, yet a question bothered her. A small, meaningless question, which kept creeping inside her mind: was there any meaning to the things she lost? But she did not worry much, as she thought that destiny would provide her with an answer when it had planned to do so.
That was, until she lost her keys at the office. That day, she thought it was fate, and that the answer would soon be revealed. So she stayed at work to look for her keys. All evening, she searched and searched and searched, and when she eventually found her keys, she kept searching for signs of something extraordinary waiting to happen. Yet nothing happened. It was very disconcerting.
To an outsider, this could just seem like a loss of time. Yet to Martha, it was different. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps she had escaped from something terrible, something that would have happened if she did not stay in the office. She might have been part of an accident on the way home, for example. Or perhaps there wouldn’t have been an accident, but this was all part of a bigger plan, which she just couldn’t understand at that moment.
Yet perhaps it didn’t mean anything at all.
So that night she started to think about it before she went to sleep. The morning did not provide her with an answer, so on the night after, she couldn’t sleep at all. Then she couldn’t find any meaning to the fact that she was not sleeping, and it only made it worst.
Soon, she was so tired that she didn’t even look for signs anymore. Nothing was happening to her and she wondered whether she might have been wrong, or only partially wrong. Maybe some things happened for a reason, and other things didn’t mean anything. After all, the files of her destiny must have been extremely complicated to take care of, if the person who managed it had to take into account all the interconnections and interdependences of one event on the other. One week later, the question still bothered her and she couldn’t even lift her eyes from the pavement.
It was then that she noticed a sparkling thing lying next to her feet. Had it always been there? She didn’t know, but today she noticed it. Or rather, the fact that she had lost her keys then been unable to sleep embodied her with the power of finding the object. It was a set of keys which did not belong to her. Another person’s loss. Fate was sending her a message.
So she happily took the keys and went to the office, relieved to see that things did happen for a reason after all.
The fact that no one ever came to ask for the keys did not bother her.

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