Hunting for big, brass comfort and joy
In the minefield of life, a good metal detector is essential, writes Aspasia Karras
TIt’s a lot of pressure to assess your gains and losses on an annual basis, to measure out your days in coffee spoons, to live your best life, to manifest your dreams
he infuriating articles about how to make and keep your new year’s resolutions are coming thick and fast. I’ve been inundated with unsolicited advice on every goddamn platform I frequent. It’s open season on self-improvement out there — gurus of every stripe extol the virtues of resolutionmaking and are setting out the 10 ways to keep on track with the “new year, new you” that you blithely articulated in your still inebriated state at the crack of dawn on January 1.
Other helpful interventionists suggest that you should hold off on making the resolutions until midway through January so that you stand a better chance of sticking to your guns. Also you may want to make life-altering decisions involving extreme exercise and diet when you are actually sober and your dry-January withdrawal symptoms have abated. Make small changes, make big hairy audacious ones, make hay, make tea.
I mean it’s a lot of pressure to assess your gains and losses on an annual basis, to tally up your personality in columns of pros and cons, to measure out your days in coffee spoons, to say “yes”, to say “no”, to live your best life, to manifest your dreams, to even decide what it is these dreams are made of.
It’s a minefield of good intentions that may or may not be misguided, but which come with a lot of expectations. The biggest of them being that betterment of one’s very human condition is possible, a state that I’m reminded daily is less Instagram-friendly than one would wish. Never mind even beginning to formulate personal resolutions when the world is belching instability and chaos like a New Year’s reveller nursing a three-day hangover.
Which brings me to the following story. My friend lost her ring on the beach last week. It was a big brass ring with a lot of sentimental value. Her daughter had given it to her during a tricky period in their lives. It was the kind of ring that comes bearing hope or maybe just comfort. A ring that says: listen, things may be quite shit right now and maybe they will continue to be shit, but here’s a nice heavy ring that sits on your finger with a solid weightiness to remind you that there is also stuff that transcends the shit. Things like your daughter’s abiding love — and so it may not all be OK, but at the very least, it’s not all bad.
That is the kind of brass ring it was. And now it was lost on the beach.
The irony was that my friend had gone to the beach for a thanksgiving ceremony organised by the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) — the people who come and save you when you’re drowning, definitely not waving. They’re heroes, those people, and should be thanked regularly.
I don’t live by the sea and will probably never need to be saved by the NSRI as I’m the paddling-at-the-surf’s-edge kind of oceangoer, but I actually give the organisation money every month. Its volunteers caught me at Christmas one year outside the Plett Pick n Pay. I was vulnerable. I’d stood in a tremendously long queue with the other punters purchasing libations to take the edge off the Christmas season and really liked the idea of being saved — especially if they could rescue me from the traffic jam I was about to wilfully navigate at the locus of the Plett shopping frenzy.
In any case, now the ring was gone and my friend, although very thankful to the NSRI, had given up what little hope she had of finding it again, given the auto-burial feature of sandy beaches.
A day later, however, things took a turn. Her daughter presented her with the ring at dinner. She just casually popped it out of her bag and said: “Here’s your ring.”
The kid has great timing. Shocked gasps ensued. The clever child had found one of those guys who wander the beach with a metal detector and a weird spade. He was working the general area of the thanksgiving ceremony and had picked up the ring earlier that day. The fact that he then handed it over was probably down to her daughter’s superlative charms. Here the ring was now, presented as if by magic from the Land of
Lost. Gifted for a second time. Doing all the things. Again.
As a casual bystander at the restitution of the ring, I was struck by two things. One: those metal detector guys must be making a killing. Two: perhaps I need one of those machines.
Maybe this year I should resolve to become a treasure hunter. It’s as good a resolution as any. I can picture myself going over the welltrodden territory of my life, sifting through the sand, waiting for the magic bleep that shows where the treasures lie hidden in plain sight. All I need to do is listen for the bleeps and find the big brass rings that I thought I had lost forever.