Surrendering To The Unknown

I just spent a half hour looking for a little piece of plastic.

It’s the bobbin cover plate on my sewing machine. I heard it hit my floor when I slid it off to change my bobbin.  I knew it had to be close by, just around my feet,  even if it bounced, it couldn’t have gone far.

On hands and knees,  I crawled  around under my desk with the tangled  threads and dust bunnies and it was nowhere.

I got my broom and swept, not just under my desk but my whole floor, just in case.  I emptied my garbage going through a week of scraps.  I emptied a bag of fabric (shaking out each piece)  that was close enough to my sewing machine that the cover plate might have fallen into.

Frustrated, I swept the floor and looked again.

But too much time had passed.  I’ve been here before.  I know I heard it hit the floor, I had looked where I  knew it should be and where I didn’t expect it to be.  It was time to give up.  Besides ordering a new cover plate, it was the only hope in finding it.

You can’t sew without the cover plate.  Lucky for me I have more than one sewing machine.  I unplugged the machine and took it off my desk.  Certain I wouldn’t be using it today.

And then, resolved that it was lost, I looked one more time.  I looked behind my desk again, where I didn’t think it was and found instead a bobbin.  Somehow that gave me hope.  The bobbin was there the last time I looked, but I hadn’t  seen it.

Then, backing out from under my desk, out of the corner of my eye, where I wasn’t looking I saw a glint of light.  And there it was.

I had swept my hands over that surface of the floor, I looked and looked, I swept it  with my broom and the cover plate had eluded me.  Until now.

I’ve been through this kind of thing enough to learn not to question it.   I truly believe it’s  the surrender that makes whatever I’ve  lost appear.

Because for me again and again it’s really a lesson in what’s important.  And in what I think I know. And in my need to be right.

It doesn’t matter if  I know I heard the cover plate drop, or that logically it should be in a certain area.  What matters is understanding that it really doesn’t matter.  Not enough to spend hours looking for it, not enough to get upset over, not enough have to prove myself “right”.

Sometimes things will happen that I’ll never be able to understand,  and I can either spend  my time agonizing over it, or I can let it go.