Now

I recently lost a diamond anniversary band given to me by my now ex-husband.

It had a single row of five spotless diamonds, each one large enough to be in its own setting as a solitaire.

It was from Belgium, purchased during a visit to the diamond capital of the world, and it represented – at the time – the buying and selling of four cars, three homes, and the birth and raising of two children.

It meant a lot sentimentally, and it was worth a lot financially.

So when it dawned on me that I had lost it, when I had turned my house upside down and inside out, when I had searched every bag and nook and cranny and inspected my jewelry box a dozen times, I was more than a little upset.

My parents were visiting, and my mom saw, by the look on my face, that I was terrified and sickened.

Now the interesting thing about loss is this: Your mind will take you to one of two places. You are either going to visit the past, and ask yourself rhetorical questions, such as, “Why did I have to wear it? What was I thinking? Where did I put it? Why did I put it wherever I put it? Why did I take it off my finger?” and, “Why didn’t I have an insurance rider? Why didn’t I put it back where I got it? Why didn’t I leave it on my finger? Why don’t I even have a picture of it?” As I rolled through a litany of questions about my lost ring, asking myself, “Why, why, why?” I realized that every one of these questions had the same purpose: To place blame.

Every one of those questions point to the past, a place that does not exist because it is gone. Blame does not help what has already occurred. It won’t change a thing.

The truth is, we somehow think that if we ask these questions, enough questions, the right questions, we might somehow change the outcome. But what has happened, has happened. It cannot be altered simply by poring over what might have been.

The other place that we go when we lose something of value is the future.

For me, the chatter in my head sounded like this: “I’ll bet that I dropped it at work, and I’ll bet someone picked it up, and is walking around with it right now. They probably don’t even know it’s real,” or “They do know that it’s real, and they won’t turn it in.”

Just like a regular Hollywood movie director, I projected a scene straight from a script, even choosing the cast and setting.

And while that seems and sounds ridiculous, it is exactly how the human mind works.

The problem is that I have, and had, no idea who might have it and what they were thinking. I have not yet met anyone who does.

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now, writes, “Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”

And so, I forced myself to investigate my feelings about the situation, and what I realized is that I was feeling a loss. I felt a loss about a relationship that ended well over 10 years ago. I felt a loss about a future that I had hoped to be. I was sad about the loss, but it was not about the loss of the ring.

Was the ring valuable? Were each of the meticulously inspected diamonds exquisite? “These are the best diamonds in the store,” the Belgian clerk confided to me. I knew, by her hushed tone so as not to reveal the information to other customers, and by the way she looked at me with a mixture of confusion and wonderment, that she was telling the truth.

‘And would that money, now spent, do me any good?’ I asked myself, as I continued to analyze my response to the loss. I certainly wasn’t going to pawn it, where I might get ten percent of its actual value.

And as for an heirloom, my children didn’t see a mother and father alternately holding a feverish little girl in their arms, rocking as they exhaustedly walked wear paths in the wall-to-wall carpeting, singing, “Yellow bird, up high in banana tree. Yellow bird, what are you saying to me? Coo coo coo coo choo, coo coo coo coo chee, I love Hannah Marie.”

My children would never see two parents backtracking for hours to locate a beloved palm-sized stuffed bunny, with a cotton-ball tail so twisted that it hung by a single thread, so that a little boy named Nicholas could fall asleep with his precious “Rabby.”

They didn’t see the couple who had once been so very much in love that even one-dimensional pictures seemed to exude an aura of happiness.

So I let go.

I decided that I needed to simply acknowledge the loss and experience having my parents with me for one more day in our lives. I needed to not make them feel anxious, and to do that, I needed to not be anxious. I needed to have fun and laugh and enjoy a lunch, a drive, a shopping trip with two very important people.

Was it easy? No. Did my mind try to backtrack and fast forward and take me for an out-of-control spin? Absolutely. And every time, I forced myself to see me doing what I was doing at that moment. I pretended that I was a witness, over top of me, watching another person doing what I was doing. And the moment that I did that, I felt free of the pain of loss. I recognized what I had, and I was filled with gratitude.

The following day, I opened a drawer of same jewelry box that I had inspected a dozen times the day before. I found the ring. But it really didn’t matter, because I had already found something way more valuable.