One Art

Charles Hardaker

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

Losing as an art. Of course this is an ironic poem, making light of something which is quite painful, but I’ve been thinking about it. It goes well with "Losers" by Carl Sandburg (posted Oct. 3, 2017). That was about being a failure, while this is about losing things, memories, places and people. But the idea is similar. The power of inside-out or reverse thinking. We don't think of losing things as good, but in fact, it's essential. There are several instances in nature that illustrate this: snakes shedding their skins, birds moulting their feathers, chicks breaking out of their shells, and yes, I'll even add the cliched-but-still-fantastic butterfly leaving behind its cocoon. In all these, losing is a sign of growth. Could losing things be a sign of growth for us, too? Is leaving a place behind us a way of spreading outward? Maybe, maybe we could see that - but people? How is losing people an indication of enlargement? There are so many ways to lose someone! And what about forgetting? How is losing our minds, our memories, that thing we call "ourselves" - growth? It looks disastrous. She's right about that. But what if this place, this form, aren't our finished place and form. What if, like a hermit crab, what we are here and now is too small for what we're meant to be and where we're meant to fit. (There's a Jim Elliot quote I heard when I was young that comes to mind: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.") What if losing bits of what we imagine is ourselves, leaving our coat of self-stories and our carefully constructed carapaces of identity is the only way to open, to unfold, to bloom?