How to Find a Missing Sock or Anything Else

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

What happened to all the missing socks?

They are in the Twilight Zone.

There they formed a coalition of mix-matched socks and were animated by a race of invisible shape-shifters. The symbiotic partnership is a thriving example of how entities can work together to form the formless and inform the clueless.

That is my current theory, but it is in flux.

How I Find Lost Things:

1. First, I look around.
2.  Then I try to visualize the last time I remember having it and where I was.
3. I look there.
4. Then, I retrace my recent steps.
5. Somewhere along the line, I pray for guidance.
6. Then, I ask people when they last saw me with it or if they borrowed it.
7. Then I listen to their advice about where to find it — usually stuff I’ve already done, but sometimes it is helpful.
8.  I walk away and do something else.
9. I come back and do all of those steps again and ask deeper questions of myself.
10. I start looking in all the illogical places like the floor around the toilet (where I have often found my wallet) and places like that. 
11. I walk away again. 
12. I start looking for something else.
13. Eventually it turns up in either some (a) really unlikely place that suddenly makes sense or (b) some likely place where I have looked before.

Keep in mind.

Everything is somewhere.

Things that you left somewhere are most likely where you left them.

Your memory, which was never fool-proof, has a lot more information to handle than it used to — which is a nice way of saying that you are becoming forgetful.

So, how do you find your missing stuff?

Try my list or someone else’s list. When that fails, take a break. Relax and replace.

Remember that it is just stuff.