In losing, we grow more grateful for all that we still have

Today I lost something that was important to me. It's no longer here. The one significant thing I'd bought in Berlin, a city I desperately miss. I left this artisan's work, I realize (only today, I realize), in a hotel room a few weeks ago. I've called. There's no hope for it. It's gone.

So this box of treasures is a lesser place now. So I have chastised myself all day long. For taking leave of a hotel in haste. For not being at least a little bit smarter.

(All my life, I've wished that I was smarter.)

But as much as I hate not having this jewel anymore, I've lived today feeling so blessed, too. That my loss is but material. That my loss is, in the end, so small.

There are planes falling out of the sky. There are children not coming home. There are jobs that disappear. There are flood waters inside homes. There are wars and there is terror and there is age and there is hurting and there is impossible injustice, raging.

Sometimes losing is what we need to be even more grateful for all we still have.