Chanced upon this poem in a movie I've watched on my flight back home:-
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.
So in the movie Diaz talked about it with the professor, about how initially the writer lost “real” things like keys, and then she started losing metaphorical things like cities and contients. And Diaz talked about how this writer is faking nonchalance about losing, but actually she misses it all. (Ink Inc, 2007)
