Nowadays

During a walk with Lina last Saturday I suddenly realized I had dropped my cell phone. It had been in my pocket last time I'd checked (which had been a while) but was no longer there. We had walked across damp fields, by lakes and almost swampland, an area with few marked paths and to us unknown enough not to definitely know our way around. There was not much else we could do than turn around and try to walk back the same way we had come. I had Lina call my phone hoping we would be able to locate it from the ringer but the fields were as quiet as ever no matter how many signals she let through. Up till recently, the fields hade been used as grazing land and a few times we had had to watch our steps. I pictured my phone laying deep in a big piece of cow dropping, on the bottom of a water puddle or somewhere else electronically unfriendly. And wherever it was it would take looking at the exact right spot to even find it.

BUT - after searching the ground for every step we took, for twenty minutes or so, I saw it! On the top of a small tuft of grass my phone laid on its back, dry and unhurt. How happy was I?! 

Really, how happy was I?

Picture that I had not found the phone. Picture the frustration I would have felt, the self-blaming for putting it in a pocket clearly not deep enough. It would have bugged me for days, weeks. I would have had to get a new one, restore the phone book etc, etc. The second I found it my bad luck turned into good dito, my frustration turned into relief. The question is though if that relief equals the hypothetical frustration I would have felt if I had not found the phone.