Irene

“It is this harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful that makes even trivial losses so difficult to accept. To lose something is a profoundly humbling act. It forces us to confront the limits of our mind: the fact that we left our wallet at the restaurant; the fact that we can’t remember where we left our wallet at all. It forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time and change and chance. Above all, it forces us to confront the limits of existence: the fact that, sooner or later, it is in the nature of almost everything to vanish or perish. Over and over, loss calls on us to reckon with this universal impermanence—with the baffling, maddening, heartbreaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Before there is science, there are stories to explain the world. They make it happier somehow.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost — and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there… Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Life, too, goes by contraries. It is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can't get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can't strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence. And we shouldn't want to if we could. The world, in all its complexities, calls on us to respond in kind. So that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated--it is to be complete.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir