Loss of Something Small

I've been trying very hard not to be upset about this, but I am.

I carry notebooks with me everywhere I go, and fill them full of scribbles about whatever random stuff happens to come into my head.

My most recent one was very nearly full up. I was almost ready to put it in the pile of used notebooks and start a new one... and I've lost it.

Sometimes I transcribe stuff, transferring from notebook to computer. Some of the stuff in this book had been transcribed. Most of it hadn't.

I'm trying to console myself with the following thoughts:

1. Most of the stuff in those notebooks never sees the light of day anyway. I don't get round to using any of it.
2. If there were any really good, really important ideas in there, they'll pop back into my head again.
3. I rarely really lose things - I'm too careful about always checking before I leave anywhere. Normally what happens is I think I've lost things, and then find them down the back of the sofa.

But... there are reasons why, at the moment, it's more likely I might have done something with some of the ideas / material in that book. And we've just had a party which involved moving all the furniture in the house and then moving it back again, and having a massive tidy-up of all the piles, so I reckon if it were in the house I'd have found it by now.

It doesn't matter. If I can't remember what was in it, then I don't know what I've lost, so how can it matter? I'll keep having new ideas - at a much faster rate than I can use them - I always do.

But...

Pah. It's annoying. And I have this awful nagging sense of directionless loss. But loss, nonetheless.

[update: it seems that if you give two posts the same title, Haloscan just assumes they must be the same, and pops up the same comment box. Thus for a while, when this post was first written and titled "Loss", it seemed to have 17 comments from people who were very understanding about me having lost a baby. And when someone popped up in the Blogger comment box and said, "Look, I know everyone else is very responsive to your feelings of loss echoing the loss of the baby and I truly understand and echo their messgaes. And yet I do also want to say how much I feel for you losing the notebook"... I was initially bewildered and then, I'm sorry, but it did rather make me giggle. Here is the original comment box, which would - if applied to this post - seem to be rather full of worthy people drawing all sorts of deep conclusions from my feelings about the notebook...]


___