Still, for all this variety, finding always takes one of two forms. The first is recovery: we can find something we previously lost. The second is discovery: we can find something we’ve never seen before. Recovery essentially reverses the impact of loss. It is a return to the status quo, a restoration of order to our world. Discovery, by contrast, changes our world. Instead of giving something back to us, it gives us something new.
Both of those outcomes sound wonderful, but neither kind of finding consistently makes good on that promise. Recovering a trouser sock that’s been missing for fifteen wash cycles might bring some satisfaction—a kind of triumphant relief that is really just the end of irritation—but it doesn’t leave anyone feeling fortunate or awestruck. Worse, sometimes we discover things that we wish we had not. A radiologist examining an X-ray detects the dark shadow of cancer; a son researching his genetic history learns that his father had children with another woman. But these are exceptions to a reasonably robust rule: for the most part, finding is as pleasing as losing is not.
Sometimes, in fact, it is more than pleasing; certain finds completely change our lives. Many factors made the death of my father difficult, but one thing above all others made it bearable: the year before he died, I fell in love. Most of what follows is an account of that experience. But just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding, the private history of an extraordinary discovery. And so, much as my father’s death made me wonder about the relationship between large losses and small ones, falling for someone made me think about what finding love has in common with the broader act of finding anything at all.
I have already mentioned one of the most important features of that broader act: finding something is almost always pleasurable. This is obvious enough when the thing we find has some clear value: it is self-evidently wonderful to find your true love or your lost diary or a hundred dollars in a parking lot. Yet there is also a value to the mere act of finding. Some years ago, for instance, I took a detour while driving home, came upon a junk shop I had never seen before, browsed the contents of its single dusty bookshelf, and, for one dollar, purchased a lovely first edition of a volume of poetry, inscribed and grandly signed by its author: Langston Hughes. I doubt I’ll ever stumble on something of so much objective value again, but it was not just the literal worth of the discovery that made it thrilling. If I had purchased the Hughes from a rare-books dealer, I would own the exact same thing but have very different feelings about it, and not only because I would have spent so much more money to acquire it. What made finding the book remarkable was not just what it was but where it was—tucked away among boxes of fishing tackle and cans of Rust-Oleum and stacks of empty picture frames—plus the unlikely fact that I happened to be there, too.
You can take away all the intrinsic value of a find and this intrinsic value of finding will still remain. At that same junk shop, I later acquired a little cast iron whale, perhaps five inches long, which set me back twenty-five cents and which I cherish just for its pleasing heft and the satisfaction of having salvaged it from the world’s flotsam. And I am not alone. After the need to economize, that satisfaction is the main reason so many millions of people visit junk shops and yard sales in the first place: because finding even relatively worthless things is reliably fun.
It is so much fun, in fact, that it is one of the primary ways we entertain children. There’s nothing inherently valuable about a North Dakota license plate; it acquires its value when, six days and forty-nine other states into a road trip, your ten-year-old finally spots one. This same logic applies to Hide-and-Seek, Capture the Flag, Where’s Waldo?, word scrambles, and the countless other games that offer their players no reward whatsoever beyond the pleasure of finding. And it also applies, in its purest form, to coins and four-leaf clovers, which we teach children to treasure and regard as talismanic. Although such things have almost no worth of their own, we consider them lucky, for the circular reason that we are lucky to find them.
This feeling of good fortune forms the essence of almost every experience of finding—even though, as I said earlier, that experience is otherwise highly variable. Sometimes it is an act of recovery. Sometimes it is an act of discovery. Sometimes it looks a lot like learning. And sometimes it just looks like growing up, since much of life’s meaning comes from things that, as we get older, we must track down on our own: friends, happiness, purpose, our vocation, our soulmate, ourselves. Still, at its core, finding something always resembles that moment, dear to the heart of six-year-olds, of spotting a penny on the ground: you are the one standing there looking when the world shifts just so and some bright glimmer—a knickknack at the junk shop, the first shining edge of a brilliant idea, the woman you will marry—catches your eye.
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Like coins and four-leaf clovers, falling stars function as a kind of lucky charm; that’s why we wish on them. But that habit is a pale version of a robust tradition. Throughout most of human history, meteorites, dimly understood but already recognized as remarkable, enjoyed a status bordering on sacred. A thousand years before the onset of the Iron Age, ancient Egyptians found that metal in meteorites, grasped its provenance (there is a hieroglyph meaning “iron from the sky”), and began using it for ceremonial purposes, including to make the dagger that was buried with Tutankhamun in his tomb. The early Greeks kept a holy stone, long since vanished but widely believed to have been a meteorite, in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Another one, reputed to have fallen from the sky in the days of Adam and Eve, has been lodged in a wall of the Grand Mosque in Mecca for fifteen hundred years. Visitors to a Shinto shrine in Nogata, Japan, have been paying respects to a meteorite there since it fell on the temple grounds in 861 a.d. And for centuries if not millennia before they were forced off their land, the Clackamas people of Willamette, Oregon, regarded a thirty-thousand-pound meteorite as a gift from the heavens, and used the water that gathered in its hollows to cleanse and heal themselves and anoint their arrows before battle.