Searching for Something Lost and Finding Something Else

  Today I lost my fountain pen that I use to write in my journal, so I went looking around my house and couldn't find it anywhere.  It's a very special pen for me because it was a gift from my Mom and it has my name engraved on it.  Have you ever lost something and it really seems to have vanished?  I've had this happen a few times and some things I never found again.  I had a sweatshirt from Chicago that I'm still searching for.
  So I was searching around my house and looked in a classic spot for lost items: under couch cushions.  I was fishing in the crack of the couch and my hand hit something metallic and I got excited for a second.  I grabbed it and realized it wasn't my pen, but a pocket knife that I had lost more than 5 years ago.  It was a pocket knife that my Dad had bought me from the hardware store and I used it to whittle when I was a kid.  I also used it throughout college and I even bought a replacement knife that reminded me of it after I lost the original.  It was something that I thought I'd never see again and to see it again was amazing.  I also found a quarter in my couch search.
 I was still bummed that I didn't find my pen so I kept searching.  I thought that it'll have to turn up eventually, but I'm not the type of person to stop looking...then it hit me like a bolt of lightning and I remembered where I had left it.  It was in the pocket of the pants I wear when I'm painting.  My search yielded two finds.
  Maybe there's some kind of metaphor in this, that we don't know what we'll find when we're searching for something.  You might find something completely unexpected.  When I lose something it's not so much that I care about the object, but the memories that go along with it  seem more fragile without the tangible object.
Losing something is worth the feeling of finding it, even if it takes a long time.