The little things we stumble upon that make life worth living

Of all the profound things found in a life, a single sock that wandered off without your permission, love on the internet at middle age, a precious book in an untidy pile in a second-hand bookshop, a grandfather’s grave buried in the weeds of a tired cemetery, it is this which is most miraculous.

The discovery of a song by a girl who can’t hear.

This is a column about the things we find in life, by design and by accident. It is about the delight of discovery and how it fills empty spaces within us. It is about opening ourselves to this discovery and not getting stuck in sameness.

And it is about a girl waiting 57 years to complete a puzzle.

The story begins in the 1960s in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. It’s the holidays, Nella is four years old and her family, all tied tightly by love, are in attendance as her grandmother ceremoniously winds up an ornamental bird, covered in beautiful feathers, in a metal cage.

It sings.

Her family listen.

She watches them, witnesses their anticipation, recognises their joy. Yet her deafness separates her and her silence has its own unintended cruelty.

“I couldn’t hear it,” she remembers, “so I would pretend as if I heard the bird sing.

“How I knew when it stopped was when its head stopped turning. For me it was embarrassment of not hearing, a reminder that I couldn’t hear, and just sadness of knowing that I wouldn’t appreciate it.”

Nella, who is English, is my sister-in-law’s older sister and when I first hear the bare bones of her story – patience, there is more to come – I am intrigued. Because it came fortuitously at a time when I was contemplating what it means to find things.

One March morning in my mother’s small town, she and I had gone to see my father’s refurbished grave. This was unusual for us, for we are not given to rituals and cemetery visits, preferring to negotiate our grief and keep our clan alive by telling stories rather than observing stone.

But then, under the peaceful shield of branches, amid stoic tombstones which tell century-old tales of loss, my mother, 93, says with one of her nonchalant shrugs: “I wonder where my father’s grave is.”

Wait, he’s here?

Yes, somewhere.

The caretaker arrives, a dusty cupboard is dived into, a sheaf of papers found. The one page which lists deaths in April 1971 is missing. Damn. But the caretaker is a kind, patient Sherlock, who’s spent a life dealing with the lost and the gone, and he dutifully thumbs pages. The grave number is found but he tut-tuts. That area is unkempt.

So we wander off the cement path, pick at shrubbery, pull at roots which emerge like nature’s arteries, our hands wet with a muddy past. A gravestone appears, a wet cloth is found, ancient dirt swept away. Nothing. Then another stone, its face wiped, reveals letters chiselled into stone.

Eric John Benjamin.

Hello, grandfather.

I am swollen suddenly with emotion for a man I barely knew (he died when I was nine). I have found not just him but also things in myself. And so when I get home, just for the heck of it, I start making a list of things found through this year.

The joy of rummaging through the brain and finding a name that the memory initially refuses to release. The delight when my daughter finds letters written to me by my granddaughter during Covid-19. “I love you,” they say in the crooked crawl of a child’s crayon over paper. One day, inside a tattered wallet (sigh, the rubbish we collect), I find a tiny telephone book from the 1990s, and it is full of people I can’t recall. A source for a story? A passing flame? I find I cannot recognise my past but it isn’t scary. Just a reminder of the changing cast of a full life.

Giving in to joy

One week, I discover a young runner, another week the writer Anuradha Roy. We’re not people fixed in place but evolving and they’re like guides on fresh journeys. I’m so weary with a world which excuses the killing of children that gentler things must be found. Like Mary Oliver’s Devotions, her poems like a hand to hold on to in the evening.

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate.

Give in to it.

There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.

We are not wise, and not very often kind.

And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left.”

In the weeks that follow, I think of archaeologists who devote their lives to unearthing things, for no reason beyond the learning it brings. The sand gives up mummies, the Antarctic ice the wrecks of lost ships, the Everest snow the boots of a lost climber. So much is found when people look.

I’ve been influenced by Kathryn Schulz’s wonderful memoir, Lost & Found, where she writes, “loss diminishes the world; finding makes it richer, more abundant, more interesting”. But we’re so hostage to the tides of life, the days inexorably sweeping in and out like waves, that we sometimes forget to look.

Only if we’re open, observing, humble, our consciousness like a door ajar, do we find intriguing things. Like my own imperfections which run deeper than a wrinkle that has settled under the eyes. Or the change in a beloved friend, who in middle age resembles a lovely vase now veined with tiny cracks. She is feeling the weight of ageing parents and a rebelling body and her sharpness has softened into vulnerability. Part of finding, and caring, is to pay attention.

Perhaps we’re always finding our way to some place, to empathy, information, light, meaning, pleasure, satisfaction, ideas, connection, and it’s this search which is intense. And when we find something we’ve been hunting for a long time it is renewing and restoring.

Like the peace it brings a woman who could not hear a bird as a child.

Nella grew up, had a cochlear implant at 41 and was released from silence. But that bird from her childhood was forgotten and mislaid and only when her father died did she ask her stepmother where it might be. It was found, shabby and silent, and in mid-2025 The Repair Shop, a TV show in the UK, selected it as an heirloom worth repairing. Before Christmas, it was ready.

“I was shocked,” says Nella, now 61, “as the cage was so gold and I hadn’t realised how beautiful it was. It was like looking at a treasure that one would find in a museum.”

She wound the bird, she turned the knob.

It sang, she cried.

“It was such a sweet melody, so gentle, it was incredible. I had a lump in my throat and a couple of tears. It took me back to when I was four years old and I finally felt at ease.”

Family has been Nella’s greatest ally all her life and it is to family – her mother, sister, brother, children – she brings the bird at Christmas 2025. A gift to the listening from the one who once couldn’t. Together they sit, joined by song, and it is both a normal day and yet a uniquely fulfilling one. For it completes a 57-year journey by a woman to find the sound of her childhood.