Funny thing happened.

Two years ago my laptop got stolen. It was just after I had spent a semester in Japan, a country where you just trust other people with your personal belongings. So I was back in Sweden and my computer bag with laptop and more valuable than that – some personal notebooks, were taken from me in a moment of unattentiveness.

This week I went to the police station to pick the same bag up – it had returned somehow. Can you imagine my thoughts when I opened the letter with that kind of notice from the police? Of course I was happy.

The ending twist of this story is – when I looked closer at the paper slips attached to all the individual items… I realized they said “recovered 090201”. So, the police have actually had my stuff in their possession all this time, and NOW they tell me to come get it.

Anyway, so this was a story of something being lost and then returning, and about how everything can change and at the same time nothing changes. The contents of the computer is the same now as when it disappeared. Looking through its contents, browsing my dear notebooks, is like traveling back in time.

This also made me reflect on a parallell series of events – that of me returning to my beloved martial arts practice. I’d been away from it for more than five years, and before that I had only practiced sporadically after my first dojo where I had been active for about 4 years was closed and its members scattered in the wind.

Now I’ve found a new dojo, a new “second home”, and am resuming the regular practice that used to give me so much in the way of personal development, health/fitness, and general kickassery. And I’m LOVING it, being back in it. It’s really another example of getting something back and experiencing it like it was never gone.

And still, of course it was. Or, as in this case, I was – gone. Time didn’t disappear in a vacuum – I was busy doing other stuff, having other experiences and other places to channel my energy into. But there’s purity and beauty in immersing oneself deeply into your original passion, and that’s something I was disconnected from.

photo © 2008 Mohsen Masoumi | more info (via: Wylio)
I guess the entrepreneurial lesson here is twofold. The first part is – what can we do to prevent suddenly waking up one day and realizing we’re just troddling around in routine activities, not making the most of the opportunity we chose to create for ourselves when starting our business? How can we stay connected with our original passion in that area?

And the second would be… Even if we do happen to stumble, and fall, and stay down for awhile – maybe we sometimes DO get a second chance to show up in people’s lives, and maybe they’re even happy to see us again? Even if the context has changed? Because sometimes in life, we do drop all the balls for awhile. Let’s save the Jack-in-the-box trick for only those situations when it’s really needed, though…