At the onset, let me start by wishing all readers a Happy Valentines Day which falls on 14^th February, 2025. They say, “Love is not for everyone.” Romantic love always has it challenges. Just see the crazy number of books we’ve read or the insane number of movies we’ve seen, all based on this one emotion. Then there’s success and fame, money and relationships. You manage some, you lose some along the way.

For everything we gain, there’s something we lose, and vice versa. Just when an old relationship is on its last embers of passion, in strides a new one, breathing fire and force to unravel your world! That’s enough to keep you dancing all night long. Just when your bank balance screams, “no cash flow in that pipeline,” a certain bank deposit ripens and matures. Yet, sometimes you’re just out of rhythm, we tend to lose our groove. Somethings are just dope and others, not so

Life’s like this big ‘Lost and Found Department’, of disillusionment, walking alongside with ever-brimming hope. Glorious at its best, life-changing at its worst… like loose change, bit by bit, we lose pieces of ourselves in the process. It could be your passion, or your drive. Strip yourself of all the activities you do in a day. Pause and then reflect. What have you lost and what have you have found? You could have started out pretty much alone in life and today you have a family to call your own – one that you love to death and one that loves you right back!

Your life choices made you gain so much more than possibly what you could have lost. Think of the countless times and innumerable versions of those ‘Unfortunately’ emails you have had to go through, trickling into your inbox while looking for a job after your second kid! Turns out interviewers can be as good at ghosting as the men you’ve dated! Like I said, life is a big box of the lost and found kind. Harsh reality here, losing or failing is really no fun for anyone. Rejections happen time and again, most days of our lives and you’ve just got to learn to pony up.

The thing is, life is a mixture of positives and negatives sprinkled with enough condiments and spices to make it all worth it in the end. You really got to stop worrying and start living. Those wrinkles and frown lines are really not something you want to add to your ‘found’ list anytime soon. Ours is a world of advancement and technology. We have gained so much. However, through living on social media and always in the contagion of news cycles, we have undeniably created a breathless speed that has affected how we live. Today, we are a society that has rejected or lost the essence of time in the literary context – to stay in the moment, to ruminate over pages of a favorite novel, to stop and reflect on great poetry.

The very cycle of life teaches us about winning and losing. We start life fresh with youth and beauty. Much like a dew touched rose basking in the early morning sunshine. Youth exude a different vibrancy and energy. It’s these very things that slowly start declining and fading much to our chagrin and angst, with the advancement in our years. But what youth denies us, age provides. We gain maturity, experience, knowledge and wisdom. We gain patience and tolerance. Humility and understanding. All form of life is a transformation, a process of change. When we work with it life grants us things, supplementing our inevitable losses with new growth and opportunities.

The policy of any lost and found department states, “The purpose of this policy is to ensure that any items left behind by people are correctly logged, packed, stored and available for claim upon request.”  In life we often lose things. Valuable things! People have lost relationships, friends, family, reputation, often their dignity and pride. Irreplaceable, irreparable losses. But humanity grants us resilience and the will to go on no matter how tough the road gets. We learn all this through the challenges.  If we learn anything here it must be; let all people speak a unified language of love. Let’s have a universal practice of compassion. Let us learn to cultivate spiritual health and longevity despite our circumstances, in fact more because of it. Let us learn to get beneath the very surface of our jobs and roles to pose as leaders in our personal growth. Let us learn to promote and encourage others to alleviate differences and disputes. We must learn to stimulate life-changing conversations for our self and others, instead of focusing on triviality and gossip.

In life we may lose our loves, our hearts and souls, but then we find our faith, our love, our courage when we least expect it. By organizing our lives around, “abiding the vine”, as they say, we learn to live faithful lives. By losing pieces of our lives, fragments of our soul, we arise. As we age, we learn to achieve inner peace, when our schedules are aligned with our values, we are given a life-giving structure for our freedom, growth and joy to flourish unfettered. After all, like I said before, “life is but a big Lost and Found Box”. Find your joy, find your peace and Love will always come around. Happy Valentines Day, darlings!