Loss, Lost, Loser and Me

Getting lost has been part of my life all of my life. Of course, those two words have a long history with religion – especially the religious body into which I was born. If you sin, you are in a lost state. While the vivid picture of hell given to all members of THE TRUE CHURCH were scary as hell (pun intended) the word LOST was scary all by itself.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.
Phil Donahue

When you are lost, you are off kilter, you are discombobulated, confused, and at first you are just worried. Eventually your worries become desperation and fear. Most of us have never experienced the Biblical hell we heard about in church, but everyone has, at least once, been lost. We all know what if feels like to be lost, to not know where you are, to have missed the turn, to have no idea to get back to the place where you feel right.

Where did you lose your Faith? by tex norman

I'm thinking, "Hell,
if I knew that, well,
it wouldn't be lost, now would it?"
I think and almost say out loud, "I might
not have had it in the first place, in which case
you cannot lose what you never had."
Instead, I check the pockets of my pants,
the breast pocket of the shirt I wore
yesterday. Next I check that little foyer
table we keep near the front door, where
I've been known to dump stuff off there
as I return from a work weary day. "Could
be," you suggest, "that you have a hole in
your pocket. If it fell through a hole
it wouldn't be your fault, still,
finding it again, well, hell,
it could have fallen out anywhere."

I checked between the cushions
of the couch and the bedside table
next to my light, among my stack of books,
but nothing. I could've sworn I'd had it
in my hand, just the other day.

I'm tired of looking for it,
but look for it out of habit.
I wonder, if it is missed
like ice cream is missed by a dieter,
or is it missed like the ache
after the tooth has been pulled?

My wife is desperately afraid of getting lost when she has to drive some place. Kathie suffers from geographic-dyslexia. She has gotten lost going to or from some place she has been to and from a dozen times. And a wrong turn fills her with an illogical fear. It is almost as if she feels that if she is lost she will be lost forever.

I have never been geographically lost forever, but I have been bewildered for hours. I had a job as a Child Welfare case manager and part of that job was to get an address and go out and check on children and their families. Sometimes the addresses were in very unfamiliar and seldom traveled areas. In that job I was lost frequently.

The word LOST is also used in contests to me you lose the battle, or the game, or the competition. This makes the word LOST a very sad word indeed. It means you tried to do something and you failed. You tried, you made an effort, you struggled, you entered the fray, you competed, but your efforts were not good enough. You didn’t WIN, you LOST.

Accept loss forever.
Jack Kerouac

Here is a hint: Never take therapeutic advice from an alcoholic, drug addicted beat generation novelist.

If you fail to win often enough you will feel like a LOSER. Consider this advice from one of our more famous Presidential losers:

You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates.
Richard M. Nixon

I can see the point Nixon was trying to make, but those of us who feel like eternal losers need no encouragement to beat ourselves up over every loss. Here is a hint: never take psychological advice from Richard Nixon.

Some quotes urge losers not to give up, to not quit, not surrender. The idea is that a loss should be the motivation to keep you trying, and if you keep trying you will eventually be a winner and not a loser. It is almost as if losing is temporary and lost implies permanency.


Sometimes what is lost is a good thing.

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds.
I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Erma Bombeck

You’d think, once a guy was sliding into 60 years of age, he would have a life he can accept, he would be a person he could like, he would feel like a winner. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like a winner in the eyes of the world, but he would feel like a winner in the eyes of himself, and perhaps his family. If you are one of those unspectacular beings (and most of us are) then as you approach the end of your life, your world gets smaller, you have become familiar with the well traveled paths in your life, and you are never lost.

If not being lost is a reasonable expectation for most of us, then feeling lost is especially sad. Feeling like you need a GPS or a tracking device implanted just under the skin is not going to make a guy feel better.

And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.
Lynn Redgrave