Don't Panic: Lessons from the Lost Ring

I want to tell you about my adventure with a ring and how it taught me some valuable lessons about life. 

A few years ago, my wife and I spent a day visiting my wife’s brother and parents. Her brother lives by a beautiful deep-water lake and her parents, live by a river not far away. We had a great time. Hiking, swimming, and just relaxing. 

On our way home, we stopped for coffee. As I walked into the coffee shop, my heart sank.

“I lost my wedding ring,” I told my wife. I held up my bare finger. Now she was as upset as I was. My wife and I love each other very much and our wedding bands—each with a personal inscription—symbolize our bond.

And now the chances of ever seeing my ring again, given how active we had been, looked exceedingly grim. 

The easiest thing to do at this point would have been to give up and accept the reality that the ring was lost forever. 

My wife and I decided otherwise. 

First lesson: Never panic. 

Stay calm and in that state of calm figure out a plan. There’s almost always a solution to your problem. And even if there’s not, just the process of putting together a plan will settle your nerves—while panic never works. 

We began by combing through the photos and video clips we’d taken to see if we could narrow the timeline. The first piece of good news was that we found a photo taken after my lake swim, and my ring was still on my hand. 

This was a gigantic statistical victory. At least we knew that the ring was not irretrievably lost in a deep-water lake. 

We proceeded to look at the photos and videos taken at my in-laws’ chalet to hopefully rule out the possibility that it was lost in the river. The river’s current is so strong that it serves as a sort of swimming treadmill. If you swim against the current, you end up staying pretty much in one spot. This is precisely what I was doing in several video clips, one of which captured the exact crawl stroke at which I lost my ring! 

But this was hardly a time to rejoice. The riverbed is littered with rocks and boulders, and the current, as noted, is strong. Finding the lost ring remained a nearly impossible task. 

We resolved to return to the “scene of the crime.” Prior to doing so, I realized that we needed to answer a crucial hydraulic question: How would a ring of that weight and size behave in the current?

We tied a test ring to a piece of string and dropped it into the river. To our relief, the ring rapidly sank at the spot that it was released. It was now quite conceivable that my wedding ring was somewhere within a five-foot by five-foot square area.

Second Lesson:  Think like a scientist. 

You don’t have to be a scientist to think like one. Employ the scientific method—reason, logic, and evidence-based thinking—when navigating through life. All three are always available to us. Our “hydraulic” experiment allowed us to reduce the search space to a small area. 

Still, the likelihood of finding the ring in such a cluttered riverbed at a depth of five or six feet was minimal. Wearing goggles, I began the arduous process of diving into the water to cover every possible nook and cranny.

About twenty minutes into the process I saw a shiny light coming from a crevasse between two rocks. 

I dove to the bottom, and, to my utter disbelief, emerged out of the water with my wedding ring in my hand. 

Third Lesson: Your spouse is your best resource.

One of the joys and benefits of marriage is that you have someone who can help you think through problems. If you and your spouse are a good team, you’ll have a much better chance of navigating through many of the vicissitudes of life. My wife had the clever idea of going through our photos whereas I suggested the “hydraulic” experiment. Our collective brain power was greater than the sum of our individual parts. 

Fourth lesson: Hold on to hope. 

Hope is truly an elixir of life. Difficult challenges are a given. A hopeful mindset is a valuable tool when these challenges invariably show up. The likelihood of finding the ring was close to zero, and yet my wife and I persisted in our belief that the problem could be solved. We never lost hope. 

Fifth and final lesson: 

No one can solve every problem—or find every lost ring. But this I can guarantee you. If you look for lost rings and use these lessons, you will find some of them. But if you don’t look, you won’t find any.

I’m Gad Saad, professor of marketing at Concordia University and author of The Saad Truth about Happiness, for Prager University.