Lost

I lost my glasses.

Obviously, I don’t know where. Since I don’t wear them around home, they sit in the case to the right of my computer until I’m driving some place where I need to be able to read street signs. But yesterday, I reached for them and they weren’t there and I don’t even know where to look. I’m so used to having them right...there.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge issue. My prescription hasn’t changed for over a decade, so several older pairs with various levels of scratchedness do the trick. But I gotta tell you, it’s annoying.

Loss is a constant for most of us. Misplacing eye glasses is the least of it. I’m losing friends and relatives on an increasing basis. The other day I started to tell a story, the facts of which a reasonable person might dispute, but then I realized there was no one alive in the world who was in a position to cast doubt on my truth-telling. That was a relief, knowing there was no buzz killing truth teller around.

I’ve certainly lost a step or two, or three, along with the usefulness of most of the holes on my belt.

All of that is more or less inevitable. Some of the losses are actually a win. I noticed this with my parents as they got older and the same thing is happening to me. I’ve lost a little of my judgmental attitude toward fellow human beings, I’m a little more generous, a little more forgiving. When you’re in your seventh decade, you’ve seen, and done, enough dumb things that it’s easier to cut the rest of humanity some slack.

Some of the losses on the horizon are bigger and more serious, and they’re not just my problem. An old saying is that the United States is the only country based not on geography, but on an idea. Our Constitution knit together ideas taken from sources as far reaching as ancient Greek philosophers and the League of the Iroquois. Geniuses took those ideas and put them together in one document and then realized they didn’t know everything, so left a mechanism for adding amendments as time changed. And add amendments we did, including ones recognizing that everyone, including former enslaved people and even women were actual human beings with rights and responsibilities. That document, those ideas, would be a lot to lose. Amazingly, people all over the country have lost the concept of those ideas, lost the thread of what makes America America, and don’t see the need for all those checks and balances, for the rights and processes that give everyone some say, that give everyone security and protection.

I can get new glasses, but I don’t think I could live in a place willing to lose something so valuable, so irreplaceable.

Just something I’m thinking about, as I look for my glasses and summer winds its way toward the Fourth of July.

Copyright 2026 Brent Olson