Unmasking the Truth

When searching for lost objects, I have long been a believer of the familiar adage, "it's always the last place you look." Duh---of course it is, since you stop looking when you find the thing, right? Well, guess what: Sometimes it's the first place you look, but you just didn't look hard enough.

I found this out for sure the other day when I needed an old Halloween mask I had packed away last year after the festivities, such as they were, ended. Right off the bat I tried the closet in my art studio, certain it was in there. It wasn't. After that disappointment I was virtually flying blind. With no other idea of where it could be, I was forced to look everywhere and anywhere, even in dumb places where I never would have put it unless I had suffered a stroke or taken some bad acid. I spent about 20 minutes rummaging around in places it could not be, then in desperation went back to the first place--that closet--and there it was, stuffed inside a shopping bag full of assorted trivia. Ha, I was right all along! Naturally I stopped looking since I had found the thing, and the first place I looked morphed into the last place I looked.

Armed with proof to the contrary, I understood how my unquestioning belief in that untruth has probably wasted hours of precious time during the course of my life, making me not look very hard in the very first place. This makes me wonder what other things I think are true are not. Does a stitch in time always save nine? Is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Perhaps it is better to leap without looking first...it's certainly less scary. And what about that whole cleanliness-Godliness thing? The mind boggles.