Have you ever lost something and conducted an obsessive, exhaustive search only to come up frustrated and empty handed? Then, a few days or weeks or more goes by and you begin to accept that no amount of searching you do is going to find that precious something that was lost.

It is just lost.

So, you give up and let it go.

You know what’s coming, right?

The very next moment after having sincerely surrendered the search, that beautiful something manages to miraculously appear in the very place you could have sworn you checked a hundred, million times.

It hasn’t moved.

It hasn’t changed.

It’s exactly as it always was and it is right where you left it.

It’s like it was never lost at all, only hidden from your sight for a while.

I lose things all the time. Right now I am currently missing one of my favorite necklaces, the key to the second lock on my front door, the cable that connects my camera to my computer, and whatever shoes it is I decide I want to wear out that day. I continually lose things inside my purse and end up having to dump out the entire bag’s worth of stuff to locate my glasses or phone.

I lost my car once in a parking lot and was minutes away from calling the police to report it stolen before I remembered that I hadn’t parked in that lot at all – it was in the lot next to it. (Besides, I was driving a ’79 brown Pontiac LeMans at the time – who’d want to steal that?)

And yet, each time I lose something, I go through the same ingrained routine of obsessive search that upends my entire life spreading chaos along my whirlwind hunt only to be left standing alone perplexed, baffled and defeated as to where “it” could possibly be.

Well, I’ve finally decided my life is too full to waste time and energy terrorizing myself on a quest that always ends in disappointment.

So, I’ve decided to try something new. I’ve decided to trust that I will find it when I find it.

More importantly, I’ve decided to believe it is not lost at all. It is right where I left it.

Of course, you know the answer to the riddle about the three frogs sitting on a log and two decided to jump off and one decided to stay, so how many frogs are on still the log?

Which raises another question – am I jumping? Or am I staying?