Lost

When I get overextended and am not getting enough sleep, I start losing things and over the last two or three weeks, I've been losing stuff or forgetting things I shouldn't forget. In no particular order, in the last two three weeks I have:

• Twice left my car lights on and required the assistance of AAA
• Lost my camera
• Lost two student papers
• Forgot students' names in class, students I have been working with over the last six weeks
  
• Lost track of time, unsure of what day it was or where we were in the school term
• Lost a Netflix DVD
• Lost one of the textbooks for my Intro. to Literature: Poetry class
• Lost track of a stack of stage makeup entrusted to me by Sparky, the director of Othello, for me and other men in the play to use

I have relied on the grace of others and others have come through. Someone on campus turned my camera into lost and found. Ray's Towing, under contract from AAA, was understanding today when I forgot to leave the car running after I got my car battery charged the first time so had to come back a second time within an hour. The students whose papers I lost had backup copies filed on either a hard or a flash drive and were most forgiving of me. Whoever found the Netflix DVD I lost recognized that it was in a Netflix mailer and mailed it for me. I was able to buy a poetry textbook before class started and so recovered from that one. Last Sunday, after our matinee performance, someone put the stack of makeup in Tyler's locker. It was safe, not lost, but I didn't know where it was. I was anxious. I didn't want to see Sparky out her makeup.

Time can't really be lost. It remains constant, ticking away, even as I lose track of its movements and find myself in a kind of twilight zone of confusion as I try to find something on my computer screen or something in my immediate environment that will tell me what day it is and what hour it is. I want so badly to be relieved of the anxiety that I have missed a class or forgotten an appointment.

I don't live like this all the time. It only happens when I cross the line from busy to overextended.

But, look how much grace is in my life. I keep hearing people say how people don't have as much concern for others as they used to or how we have a deficit of values in our society. I disagree. In every case over the last two weeks, people came through: didn't keep my camera, forgave me a lost essay, mailed the lost DVD to Netflix, acted like my stupidity around my car was no big deal, and so on.

Ealier I posted pictures of RBT and Spencer helping Dave Oliveria jump his battery at last week's HBO blogfest. No deficit of values there. Up and down the street I live on, up and down the rows of seats in my classroom, up and down the hallway I work in, where my colleagues have their offices, and up and down the aisles of stores I shop in and encounter people who are polite, forgiving, friendly, and helpful, I encounter more grace than malice.

They make the world I move in a forgiving place. They embody a surplus of values, not a deficit. I'm amazed when I hear people say that people are not nearly good to each other as they used to be,when I see and experience how good people are in the places I go, whether at stores, school, church, or our neighborhood.

So, I've been lost over the last few weeks. The consequences, however, did not punish me. Quite the opposite. I found out how helpful, forgiving, and trustful people can be. At least in my small world, people don't seem lost. They seem to have a reliable moral compass.