"The Art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master"

(with thanks, of course, to Elizabeth Bishop)

I've been going on and on about being the tail wagging the dog, the smile that starts firing happy chemistry. Then my house, and my neighbor on the other side of the duplex, got broken into on Wednesday, and irreplaceable family jewelry was stolen. Today, shopping on the way home from group where we'd been discussing how to wag that dog and create that smile, my scooter was stolen from right beside me as I browsed for a gift for my niece and perhaps a little token of safety.

Law of Attraction specialists, what am I doing that's making this happen?

The whole premise of wagging the dog, pushing the smile, is to override the negative/abusive/destructive self hypnosis that goes on unconsciously or subconsciously or semi-conscoiously or, heck, consciously! I've been in tears begging myself to please stop at times, when the vicious voices surface.  

But praise and bless, if they're so loud they move me to tears, isn't that far easier to counter than some subconscious meme you don't even realize you're sabotaging yourself with? And perhaps these thefts are "out loud in life" versions of the same surfacing.  Something I've been struggling with as I-tail try to wag my dog is:
WHAT MATTERS?

And on Wednesday, aside from the violation of having strangers in my house without my permission, and the theft of a parcel from a friend that I hadn't even opened yet since I haven't been opening my mail, I lost jewelry that was precious and expensive and, in one case, antique/heirloom/irreplaceable/old country/not really even mine. I felt it was entrusted me for a while by the family.

But is anything really mine? Isn't all of it out on loan?

And now today I lost something less expensive and definitely replaceable, but something that's part of my daily routine and practicality, so replacing it is more an issue of expense and convenience.

Was it worse to lose something practical, or to lose the precious? Isn't it all just stuff? Isn't it all just loaned us?
And then there's the language cue/clue--my obsession with the idea of losing weight. My not locking the back door. Was I just waiting to lose instead of losing weight, about the only thing I don't seem to have lost of late?

Maybe not just a language cue/clue, if my failure to answer "what matters" was matched by obsession with "lose weight"--lose-wait-weight-loose. 

You snooze, you lose. You weight, you loose. You loose, someone else walks off with treasures you don't really believe are yours to let loose. What am I losing while I wait to figure out what matters?

And if this seems like self-indulgent scratchpad-post-avant-garde poem drafts, please know that I'm just a poor logomancer trying to figure out what's going on by playing with the words. It's all I have left, and often I'm at a loss for words also. 

As I play with the words, as I form them into sentences and speech acts, I try to stay in the realm of the question. I was writing here recently too on how important it is to ask the right questions. Just as I can counter the cruel self-talk with tails that wag the dog, so the questions I'm asking are like blueprints for an atmosphere, for beautiful gardens, for airily furnished rooms. I can ask a question that holographs a pity party, clotting my fingertips into a low-beamed ceiling in a smoky room of sweaty bodies dancing. Or I can ask a question that loosens the basketry of my sinews and opens my tight brain up into expanses of space beyond the red and blue of arterial and venous blood, beyond the intoxication of oxygen, beyond where any mind-altering chemical, endogenous or exogenous, could possibly take me.

I have been more afraid to fall into that emptiness than to consume dangerous chemicals, or nothing at all for far too long. I have been more afraid of that sky that is also the abyss, that blood neutral to oxygen, that endless potential that somehow holds its own parametrization within it, than to sabotage and exhaust and wear down and sell short, and every other blessed cursed rabbithole firecracker that any creative person has ever wobbled around mesmerized.

There it is. What am I weighting for? What do I have to lose?