I was lost. Completely, unutterably lost. As bewilderingly lost as the cast members of Lost, except I didn’t have the serenity of the sea facing me nor the undiscovered beauty of an island engulfing me from all sides. It was the same black void of my five-year-old laptop I was staring into and the same old familiar relics and reminders of islands I had already discovered and forgotten strewn across my room that was poking at my ethereal sides when I discovered this immense feeling of being lost.
How wonderful it would be if the actor moreover the state, of being lost could be so easily identified as a lost key, a lost scarf or maybe a lost memory even. I will not even go through the wonders that the sense of retrieval can bring. Oh, the glory! But the very state of the self-being lost is in itself a contradiction. You are, and yet you are not. And the choice of “to be or not to be” remains a paramount privilege yet to be exercised. For “to be or not to be” presumes a state of being. But to the person lost, it is this very being that is in question. Are you, or are you not?
I wish this state of being lost; realizing it and evaluating it, could be so easily done, like calculating just how much sugar I needed for my next cup of coffee, which is always the same answer – one full teaspoon. And yet, even though losing oneself should be the most personal of all things lost, it goes by as unnoticed and subtly as a presence never felt in the first place. This brings to mind one of Elizabeth Bishop’s most celebrated poem-One Art, where she wrote, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” And so it seemed to be this case of my being lost.
Over the years I have in fact lost count of quite a few things that I have lost, and some have included memories. One significant lost item though consisted of a bunch of poems, some fifty plus if I remember well because this was some twenty years ago. I might have lost a bit of myself with those pages then, both of which I never recovered. I have since then lost some books, a name, more houses than I can recall, a few relations, a dear friend or two, a mobile phone, two umbrellas, some photographs, many, many dreams and even more poems. So maybe the art of losing isn’t that hard to master after all.
“Patience is a virtue.” “With age comes resilience.” How many times must I have received such advice hammered by my mother into my impatient, unyielding self? These kinds of advice taken more as warning signs that were things to rebel against. And yet when it came to the act of losing, I always gave in and let it embrace me, be it in the name of experience or just a habit cultivated unsuspectingly over time. As though in-sync with Bishop’s poem, I was, in fact, practicing in my own ways to losing farther, losing faster until I had finally grown just as resilient as my mother wanted me to be that none of these losses really brought me any disaster.
So there I was finally coming to terms with my new found reality of being lost. I was nearing the end of my twenties yet I did not want to label it as just another “quarter-life crisis” phase or brush it off as something every one of my peers must be or will be going through sooner than later. For months I agonized over my lost self as though to ask myself if I could only remember where I had put it or locked it away. When that didn’t work, I reached out to the external world in the form of friends, mentors, even an occasionally hammering mother, books, articles, TedTalks, weirder articles, and I was just as hopelessly lost as I was on that first day. I decided then that albeit all my failures, I would not lose this one realization. So, over one evening sitting in front of my same old black screen, engulfed in an island of all things loved and lost, sipping a calculated cup of strong coffee, I typed away the first lines of my journal in a long, long time…“If you want to be found, you must first master the art of being lost.”
One Art
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses, went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.
Kavita Gurung
