The Lost Shoe

(Lesson 8 on the Path of Sanity in a Socially Dissonant World)

There seems to be an odd frequency with which one finds a single lost shoe in the street. Each time I come across one, I find myself pondering the same questions. Starting, of course, with: How does one lose a single shoe??But this immediate, reflexive query leads, inevitably, to a cascade of follow-up questions...

• Could there have been an accident, and the shoe was left behind in the hurry to get help??
• Maybe it was an amputee? Or someone was simply a little too inebriated in their stumble home the night before??
• Did the person losing the shoe notice, but not care??
• Were they travelling so fast they couldn’t stop and pick it up? Did they curse the loss as they hurtled on their way? When, instead, they could’ve emulated Gandhi and tossed away the other shoe to, perhaps, benefit a following stranger with no shoes at all?
• What were their thoughts when they reached their destination, minus one shoe??
• Did the people they must’ve encountered at their destination query them on their one bare foot?

By extension, I often introspect more existentially…?

As we walk the paths of our lives, what do we caste aside? What do we drop or lose or have taken from us? Are those losses balanced in the consequences we face thereafter? How often do we stop and assess those balances, before or after the loss? How often do we weigh the choices, the risks and sacrifices we make or have made upon us, whether by necessity or passivity, against the changes they precede? How hard do we routinely fight to find the gain even in a loss, rather than suffer and trundle along begrudgingly rehashing it in our hearts?

That one lost shoe seems so inconsequential, hardly more important in the grand scheme of a life than a misplaced sock or a missing chess piece. Nonetheless, I wonder how deep down the philosophical rabbit hole one can dive… and if that smiling cat ate Schr?dinger…