The short answer:

Perhaps, even if it doesn’t seem so.

The long answer:

When I was in kindergarten, I had a habit of losing my mittens. I didn’t think that losing a mitten was a big deal, but then again, I wasn’t the one who had to keep buying them. To stop this, my mother started attaching them to the sleeves of my winter coat with safety pins. (Alas, this only seemed to increase the chances of me losing my coat.) Eventually, though, I felt that I was old enough to graduate myself from mitten school, and so my last two years of college were spent pin-free.

But two days ago, I was out for a late bicycle ride, and somewhere along the way one of my black gloves fell out of my coat pocket. By the time I discovered this, it was already getting dark, and while I retraced my route in hopes of spotting it, I was unsuccessful. Oh well, I thought, at least some one-handed hobo will be happy, that is, unless he’s left-handed.

Back at home, I was prepared to move on with my life, but as I tossed my remaining glove onto the table, I felt unsettled. There is something oddly depressing about a glove whose mate has gone missing. It is not the same as when a sock goes missing. If one day you are folding laundry and there are an odd number of socks, there is an easy solution: keep putting the socks back in the dryer until it eats another one. (Either that or find a friendly pirate hobo.)

But it’s different with a glove. People do not own a multitude of gloves—and rarely two identical sets—and they can also be somewhat difficult and expensive to replace. Here I had a lone glove, and what was I to do with it? Common sense might tell me to throw it out, because a single glove is pretty useless. But this seemed unfair. This glove was just as wearable as it was the day before, and yet it was about to be cast aside simply because its mate was gone. Somehow, in just an instant, it had become worthless through no fault of its own—curse you, gravity!—and I seemed to have no choice but to get rid of it.

And so I wondered, is worth really so fragile? If this glove can go from a necessary (and waterproof) accessory to a useless wad of fabric just because I was a little careless, who’s to say that any of us is safe? Certainly I would like to believe that my work is worth enough that a similar fate could not befall me, that I won’t learn at the tip of a hat that everything I’m doing is worthless. But they say that accidents and paradigm shifts can happen at any time, and anyone who thinks that they are immune to them is going to have their gloves and socks knocked off one day.

I was feeling a little depressed about it, so today, on a whim, I went back along the route where I had lost my glove. About halfway through, I spotted a black glove by the side of the road. I stopped for a moment, but, alas, it wasn’t mine, so I moved on. Finally, just a few blocks from the end of my ride, I found it. It was lying in the street in an empty parking space. I stopped, picked it up, and tried it on. And you know what? It fit like a glove.

And just like that, I felt better. Perhaps worth is not something that just disappears, even if it might appear so. With a little effort, maybe it’s possible to salvage some or all of what seemed lost. Maybe what was lost was not the worth itself but only our perception of it. And even if, like all those mittens that I lost in kindergarten, there’s no hope of recovery, perhaps there is still some worth to be regained, say, as a rather contrived metaphor.

I was so happy afterwards that I didn’t even notice the other glove on my way back. It might have been gone, but in all likelihood it was still there and I just wasn’t paying attention. Ah well. I hope at least that someone out there is looking for it.

Cheers,
-qm