I Don't Lose Things

Do you ever wonder if life has purpose? Did consciousness arise as a byproduct of evolution? Was there a purpose to its rise? Maybe it’s just a practical improvement, found through evolutionary iterations that determined consciousness created better outcomes for survival. That’s not as glamorous as a divine creator who gifted souls and consciousness to humans. How do you feel about all that?

These are the questions I like to ponder, and what I hope to convey in my writings. I prefer to think of myself as a part of something greater, something undefinable and beyond what we are capable of understanding or even imagining. God is what I call that. I do not confine our journey through life to a plan, destiny, or anything else, but I do feel that we have a job to do, and that is to observe and interpret our experiences.

Here is a fun story of what happened to me over this past week, and I wonder if you can figure out what it means. What lesson can I learn? Here is the story:

I do not lose things; I am a careful person. I have lost my wallet exactly one time in my life, and I have never lost a phone or anything like that. I might also note that the one time I lost my wallet, I was engaged in a harmless activity I felt a little guilty about. But on Thursday, I lost my phone. Sort of.

I was walking along the beach by myself, having a great time, listening to the surf, people watching, and kicking my ankles through the shallow water. I came to a rock weir that I know well and decided to walk around the end of it, which meant getting into waist-deep water, so I took my phone out of my pocket and held it high. Something I have done many times.

A rock weir, if you are not familiar with these, is where they place very large boulders along the seashore to slow erosion. The rocks collect barnacles, sea life, and many broken, sharp-edged shells. When I started around the end of it, I stepped on a submerged rock I hadn’t seen, covered in those sharp shells, and fell onto it, dropping my phone. Along with cutting my toe pretty badly and skinning my legs, I hurt my pride, as a nice young lady came over to help me and asked if I was ok.

The pride part is that I felt I was being treated as a fragile old guy. I did not like that, and it may have something to do with whatever lesson is to be learned. But I suspect there are many lessons due to this particular hour in my life.

We looked around for my phone, but the surf was pretty heavy, and I imagined it had been taken out to sea. Although there was some part of me that had an intuitive idea that the ocean would return it to the shore somewhere. So I returned multiple times that day and into the evening, when the tide went out, to see if I could find it. Nothing.

Here we take a moment to appreciate our modern technology and services, for two reasons. First, it was amazing to see how lost I felt without that phone, and how much my life revolves around it. Second, I was able to get a replacement within hours, delivered to my house! Are you old enough to remember using a pay phone and dialing large strings of numbers to make long-distance calls?

And here, I’ll take a moment to remind all of you to back up your phones. I had not, and that was a major problem, causing hours of work to upload and install most of what I had onto the new phone. Thank God for my ten-year-old daughter, who is a genius and did most of the work.

I bet you did not guess this was coming. Nearly two days later, a young fellow called my wife and told her he had found my phone. Wait! How could he possibly know how to call my wife? Because the phone was still working! I had to see this.

I met the young man, who said he found it in a few feet of water near where I had lost it. He couldn’t open it since he doesn’t have my face, but I could, and believe it or not, it worked perfectly. I immediately ran home after handing him $40 of gratitude and backed it up. Then I transferred all my data to the new phone and proceeded with my phone-addled life seamlessly. Happy ending.

Things got even better. I had paid full price for the new phone and couldn’t get a credit since I no longer had the old one. I went back to the Apple Store, told them the truth about what had happened, and they gave me a $410 credit! Half of what I paid, and I was ecstatic.

These kinds of things happen to me often, but I do not think anything like this has happened to my wife even once in her life. What about you? Do these types of things happen over and over for a reason?