A few years ago, I had read a very witty reply to the line - "It's always the last place you look..." when you are looking for something and can't find it. The reply was,"Of course it is the last place you look. Why would you continue to look for it after you have found it?" A reply that in the last couple of weeks has found meaning in my life, twice!
I bought a pair of sunglasses and wore them out of the store. It felt great to wear a really nice pair of sunglasses that I had wanted to have for a long time. Also, they looked great on me! Now, within an hour of the purchase I am to have lost them in a mall. A half hour after leaving the mall, I come to realise that I do not have my sunglasses and I run back to the mall. Nobody seems to have seen them and the possibility of them having stolen is low since it was a very quiet day. All the same it was difficult to look for them in a huge store, where I had been browsing for a while. My sister-in-law who was with me, asked me to replay what I had done and where I had been. After doing that for a long time and going crazy with worry in the meantime fearing the loss of such an expensive pair of sunglasses, I pray for a miracle. Suddenly, I get a vague image in my head of some t-shirts and some connection of those t-shirts to my sunglasses. I go over to that section and surely, there resting between a pile of t-shirts are my sunglasses. In order to find my size t-shirt in that pile, I had neatly placed my sunglasses and had forgotten to pick them up. As someone who prides himself (maybe a bit too much) in being systematic, these things do tend to happen to me often. Quite interesting, but I say that the system needs a tune up once in a while.
A couple of weeks hence, I lose the same pair of sunglasses. This time, in my own home! I come back home yesterday while having those over my eyes and remember not being able to see the keyhole properly because it's already quite dark and I am too lazy to take the sunglasses off my eyes. Today morning, of course, I can't find them. Since yesterday I was alone at home, so I couldn't even blame my parents or the maid for having misplaced them. My frustration at myself tames itself because admitting to being so absent-minded takes some serious effort. Again, following the advice of my sister-in-law, I try to replay my actions in my head and I just remember opening the door, almost blind. I had grocery bags in my hand at that time and so I try to see if I kept those sunglasses in the bags and put them in the fridge. Now, that happens to a lot of people and that would have been soothing to my conscience if that was the case, but it was not to be so. I searched the entire flat, even places where I thought it was impossible for the pair of sunglasses to be. But, I couldn't find them.
I was sure that they were in the flat somewhere and so ultimately, I resigned to the fact that I am not going to find them. I took my messenger bag and took out all my stuff from it and went to keep it at its usual storage place and voila, there it was. My pair of sunglasses. I have no idea how they got to be there but surely they were there. I had found them. Perhaps a ghost placed them there but honestly, I have no recollection whatsoever of having placed them there. In my search for these sunglasses, I also happened to tidy up the flat a bit. But for sure, it was the last place that I would have thought to look!
My Oakley Crosshair
