Eureka! The Trick To Find Things You Misplace Without Getting Stressed Out

Do you often tear your hair out on not finding something – anything that’s important in your day-to-day life, right at that moment when you need it for a purpose? Sounds like an everyday affair? Then you must read this piece by Dr Sakuntala Narasimhan who gives you a dose of humour and an effective trick to find your missing darlings without having to be anxious about it.

Eureka! It works, it works. Every time. Here is a solution for a failing that is very common, especially among the elderly.

You misplace your keys and search for it frantically. It was right here, a minute ago. You look in your purse, then empty out your handbag. The keys are not there. You look on the table, under the table. You hunt under the sofa cushions. On the floor, on your dressing table, even the bathroom.

Finally, you give up. Then you remember you also need to find a medical receipt that needs to be sent for reimbursement and a CD that you promised to lend to a friend. You rummage, through the pile of papers on the writing-table and the bedside table – and lo, the key bunch surfaces from under the pile, stuck between the pages of a book where apparently it was used as a bookmark.

The trick is to pretend that you are looking for something else, not the keys, and promptly the keys surface. It’s a game you have to play, even with inanimate objects like keys and wallets that – believe me – have a mind of their own, and viciously try to upstage humans.

Next, I pretend I am looking for the CD, not the medical receipt. And promptly – you guessed it — I see the medical receipt under a notebook (where I had looked earlier and can swear it wasn’t there at that time). It’s like hide and seek. Harmless, even if exasperating at times.

And so it goes. Every time. Pretend you are looking for something else, and the thing you are really desperate to locate will be found. I have tried it again and again, and as I said, it works. Every time. Yesterday I could not find a blouse that I wanted to alter. I could not find it, even after I emptied out the whole pile of blouses from the cupboard shelf. So I decided I would stop looking for it (it even helps if you mutter to yourself, ‘I am going to stop looking for that wretched blouse’, to make your intentions doubly clear to that recalcitrant blouse) and began neatening the upper shelf where my saris were stacked. Need I say it? The truant blouse surfaced, hidden between the folds of two saris. Quickly I grabbed it before it could disappear again, and started opening out the seam to alter it.

Try it. There are always several items you have misplaced and are trying to find. Pretend you are hunting for one thing, and you will find the other. Now I must really go to look for my reading glasses, but will pretend that I am searching for my pen (I had left both on my bedside table last night –where could they have slinked away to, during the night?) You bet I will find the glasses first…..