One Ring to Rule Them All?

On my 21^st birthday my parents gifted me a ring. My fascination for this mundane piece of jewelry was so much that I have been wearing the ring every day for the rest of my life so far, only removing it when I take a bath. But then, whenever I have to leave my home for a duration longer than a day, say for college in another city, I have to keep the ring back at home, lest my forgetful brain loses it to time and good old lapse of memory.

But each time I remove my ring and leave the house, my fingers start to feel as if something is missing. If you look carefully, they even have the marks of my ring having occupied its rightful place on my hand. I keep feeling the physical ramifications of not wearing the ring, even as I go about my days. The odd sensation of ‘something is missing’ continues to linger through.

Now why did I go about elaborately explaining my relationship with a random piece of jewelry? Well, over the past few weeks I encountered a lot of people in my life, losing a lot of things, sometimes even parts of themselves. And I started to wonder why it was affecting them so much.

How I see it is, each new person, each new dream that we give a place in our life, they occupy their rightful place in the island of our mind. And when we have to lose them to circumstances or out of our own actions, we keep feeling that something is missing.

We keep looking back at the memories (like I keep staring at my empty fingers) of the things and people we lost, wondering where we went wrong, what we could have done better, how things would have been different if we still had them.

It is a sense of security that we lose when we have to let go of the metaphorical rings in our life. Now my point is, just because we lose a ring, doesn’t mean we can never wear another. Just because we lose a dream or a friend or a lover or parts of ourselves, doesn’t mean we can never find our way back to dreams and people and versions of ourselves that will make us happy again.

Sure, we may grieve the loss but we never lose the space for something or something else to take their rightful place. We might still have the marks of the rings we lost to the test of time, but up until we have the space for something new to take its place (with time of course) we are good.

Because it never was ‘one ring to rule them all’. It will always be many rings (and necklaces and chokers and watches – you get the point!) till we find the ones that stick.

And this is what I wish for you too, to grieve the lose of all the metaphorical rings in our life, knowing full well that we haven’t lost our fingers to be able to wear another. And if we do lose the whole of our hand (metaphorically speaking), we still have all of our body to adorn the beautiful pieces of jewelry that we call our dreams, our friends, our lovers and versions of ourselves.