Ken Sim, for example, mayor of Vancouver in the west of Canada. It was astonishing when Ken Sim, after his defeat, said: “This is the most beautiful moment of my life.” A loser who sounds like a winner. Still, the effect calls to mind a rather European gesture. Losing is not a matter of luck, but belongs more to character. For character decides how the loss of an election, a bet, a relationship, or a living being shapes the future. Does bitterness have a best-before date, or does it eventually vanish all on its own?
Is losing not a disgrace, but rather a challenge?
Who likes to lose, after all? Except, perhaps, problems and other difficulties. Those are welcome to lose themselves somewhere.
In my age group of folks in our late seventies, losing is almost part of the daily routine. One loses one’s patience when the server takes forever. One loses one’s keys or wallet and will go green and blue with frustration. At least that provides a few splashes of colour in the grey of everyday life. But the truly threatening loss is the loss of the mind — when age wears the intellect down bit by bit, the way water wears down a stone. When a name, or some other word, simply refuses to surface, even though the head is tuned to intensive searching. That is more than annoying. That is the first hint of what it might feel like to lose oneself.
When the simple “annoying” of losing becomes something more, the loss can no longer be tucked away. Losing one’s life, for instance. When, in the middle of one’s statistical life expectancy, that expectancy is cut short by a bullet, an illness, or an accident. This loss can hardly be described. It stands in the room as irrevocable, as plain fact. A person is no longer among the living with us.
From private loss to public loss is but a step — then death becomes a spectacle, and things get dicey with universal human rights. It was reported recently in the media that in the United Plagues of America, public shooting is to be reintroduced. A man sentenced to death, a thirteen-fold murderer named Nidal Hasan, is to be shot on the base at Fort Hood on December 3rd of this year. First, the US administration announced that the proceeding, carried out by firing squad, would be available to the world’s population via live stream. A carnival spectacle for the people. The authorities have since backed away from that idea.
They have scrapped the idea of execution-by-phone.
Who, in voicing this original idea, lost touch with reality?
No one wishes to lose voluntarily. That lies in the nature of loss. And yet losing itself has a few instructive consequences. Not always, but often. Whoever loses themselves in an idea will have learned a great deal after the hard landing. Above all, how a convincing idea, in the end, wasn’t quite as good as it seemed.
I am just now considering all those moments of the past seventy years in which I have lost. Good heavens. The list is extremely long. I seem to have lost track of my losses. Has losing done me any harm? No, not really. Or better still: quite the opposite. The learning curve in losing money, reputation, power, face, status is never terrible. Only instructive.
With the loss of loved ones and other living beings, the matter looks different. But there, at least, a vast treasure of memories of a person remains behind. And I keep tending the fact that I got to meet and know this person or that one at all.
Today and tomorrow I am practising the art of letting go of things I don’t really need. Most of us probably know this feeling when a move of one’s belongings is coming up.
I want to lose sight of things.
For good.
It makes for freer breathing and freer moving, when a bit of ballast loses its presence at my side.
Sorry, ballast. It was nice, but that’s enough now.
