Where's my other half?

What is it about gloves and sunglasses—the two personal attachments that won't stay attached to me long enough to get through a complete season without losing them? The image above chronicles how I started this winter season with only half-pairs of gloves. I bought more and the latest half-pair is below, its other half somewhere on the streets of NYC.

While out walking yesterday, back on the streets of Boston, I wore one dark green glove on my right hand and the light green one (above) on the other. I dropped a letter in the mailbox, and a quick trip to the bank and poof! I'd lost another one. I retraced my steps and found it. The picture below chronicles what I saw a few moments later: someone else's lost half weeping for its owner on the pavement—I'm not alone in this syndrome.

Being the keeper of these one-handed sets of gloves got me thinking about a Yiddish saying I read a few days ago, "Gott shtruft nisht mit beide hendt," or "God does not punish with both hands." There's always something to be learned, even from the harshest of circumstances. The challenge while being in the middle of one is to hope that time will pass quickly enough so that I'll see the silver lining to this moment's apparent adversity.

Some describe romantic pairings as though the two people "fit like a glove." But even those seeming "beshert" or destined couplings can fall apart and we lose our other half. Plato's Symposium waxes on the story that the Gods' impatience with man — supposedly in our original state thought to be paired beings: half man and half woman, or two women, or two men— exacted on us all the punishment to be split in half, so that we would spend our lives in search of our other half. My stash of unpaired gloves and earrings remind me—if I let them—that I was once—in this lifetime or another one—part of a pair, and might be so again.