I lost my glasses
One Sunday evening my girls and I were wandering on a pathway around the lake, staring at the ground where I'd just lost my favorite pair of glasses - while walking with a new friend and our giant fluffy dog. My heart was sinking; I was beginning to face a reality I did not want to see.
I needed to accept that I had lost one of the very few material items I feel any real attachment to.
A kind soul noticed what we were doing, and inquired.
She promptly instructed her partner to walk in the opposite direction so they could join in the search.
A mother and daughter walked by; something within nudged me toward them. I wondered if they might be willing to help. She listened with compassion. They kept walking, joining the search.
The cold air and melting light told me it was time to get my tiny humans home. I didn't want to give up, but it seemed that it was time to release hope that things would turn out as I yearned they would. They each kept gazing at me in turn. One asked if she could hold my hand. I was weeping within, but together we tried to start searching for beauty in a hard thing, however small the breadcrumbs might be. Both girls know how much these simple glasses mean to me. (They each put them on and pretend to be me.)
I allowed myself the rare privilege of allowing tears to fall silently in the decending night. (After all, who would see?)
Then, as we trudged slowly by one of the waist-high light posts where my internal whisper to ask for help came, my eyes glued to the earth, scanning, tendrils of hope drying up, my youngest picked my glasses up from the rounded top.
Balanced perfectly, precisely where they needed to be. I was so lost in my despair, I would have walked straight past. But the tiny human walking beside me did not give up on hope.
A kind human (or four) listened to me, took time out of their day to search, came back, and gently placed my glasses precisely where they needed to rest to be found. As she held them up towards me, eyes open wide in awe, I wept with gratitude.
It was a message I needed on this particular Sunday night. I am not forgotten. Even in the small things. The simple things. The tender, invisible things. The heart of who I am and what I care about, matters. I am grateful that there are those among us who choose to give, share, and see hope in unexpected spaces and places, right when it feels just out of reach.
