I came across this post on sleepisfortheweak.org.uk and i love it. I love the imagery of viewing things in life as 'missing' and 'found'
Im going to start with my own jars and find out what i might write on my scraps of paper. My favourite bit is when she puts something in the 'missing' jar and says 'you are just in there temporarily okay?'
have a read and then maybe think of you and what might go into each of those jars.
She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.
With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.
Letting her mind wander in the hope she might be able to sneak up on her word and surprise it into croaking out some coherent thoughts before it realised, her eyes came to rest on the day’s detritus, dinosaurs mixed with pirates tumbled with Transformers, who had all spent the day in the determined grasp of little hands manoeuvring them in complicated adventures. And she smiled and wrote her favourite name in the world in expressive letters, as befitted its owner, dropping it into the Found jar. The feel of the pen in her hands reminded her of another, and so ART came next, and that felt good as that was a word that had spent long years pushed away, for fear of mistakes and failure and goodness knows what else. And hell, yes, that meant PHOTOGRAPHY, too, and WRITING and MAKING, and BOOKS, and TREASURE HUNTING, and BEING BOLD and BEAUTIFUL THINGS all the other things she’d found new joy for over the last year or so. She wrote them all out and dropped them one by one in the jar. God, they were coming thick and fast now; new friends, happy parents and brother, blog, twitter… She paused before writing out, COMFORTABLE IN MY OWN SKIN, with a (nearly) added, just for honesty’s sake. PURPOSE, yes, that was something found too. Gosh, yes, that one had spent long years as property of the old toad, it felt good to liberate that one.
She stopped. Wow, that jar filled up quick. Time to prod the other word again. Missing. Hmm. Missing missing missing. She wrote out, THE RIGHT HOME, and paused with her fingers over the Missing jar. No wait, that was stupid. She had a house, and okay, she didn’t own it, and it was small and cramped, without fancy stuff and not in the nicest of areas, but it was cheap and homely and slowly feeling like an extension of her own skin, filled with simple things that made her happy. With a decisive nod she moved her hand to drop the piece of paper in the Found jar. Likewise, BETTER HEALTH made her stop. Her wrists ached and she could feel her hips beginning to seize after a busy day, it would be easy to drop that one into the Missing jar. But the truth was she was healthier than she’d been since she was probably 8 years old. She had found ‘better’ – so that should go in Found too. MORE MONEY she ripped up altogether. Even GRANDMA she couldn’t bring herself to put in the Missing jar. Leave her her rest, she thought. She’d found peace, and deserved to sit amongst good things, so into the Found jar she went too.
And with that she sat back and looked at her jars, the folded squares of paper overflowing from one, the other empty but for a single square. The desire to rack her brains for more things to add to that one had completely left her. If there were any others they probably weren’t all that important anyway.
She slowly peeled off the label, adding a temporarily above the Missing before sticking it back on.
She smiled.
Life was good.