What is a treasure that has been lost?

Today’s Bloganuary prompt got me thinking, what would that mean? When a treasure gets lost, does it stop being a treasure? Or is it about treasures that one has lost?

The word treasure takes me to the timeless classic: The Count of Monte Cristo – the story of how Edmond Dantès a young man who has been duped by the world of everything he had, only to be reborn as the powerful Count of Monte Cristo, armed by a newfound treasure.

But Alexandre Dumas‘ timeless classic is the story of treasure found, not treasure lost. What happens when you lose your treasure?

In Dumas’ novel, treasure refers to materialistic gains – gold, jewels, and what not. In that sense, any treasure you gain is something you are going to lose at some point. As it should, money and assets come and go. Nothing is permanent. Even if you make a fortune and bury it in a super-secret vault for safekeeping, all it takes is an earthquake to destroy it. There’s the famous story about how deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar burned $2 million of cash to keep his family warm (of course he had hundreds of millions dollars still lying around)! Now, even if you manage to keep your treasure safe, when you die, will you take it with you?

From that perspective, I will argue that every treasure is meant to be lost.

But among those, there are things that are more difficult to lose. The values that you could cultivate in yourself – kindness, empathy, positivity, passion… those are the real treasures. So are the skills that you can learn. Education is a treasure that you can always pick up, and something that you practically cannot lose! Of course, one could argue that terminal memory loss or a traumatic incident could erase your memories, and there’s always death – the big eraser! But unlike material treasures, the treasures of your mind, stay with you, wherever you go, and have definitely more longevity than material treasures.

What I’m saying is – material treasures can be (and will be) lost… But the immaterial treasures, your learnings, your skills, your attitudes, you will never lose them.

Oh, I’m speaking from experience. I have lost a lot of material treasures, but I’ve kept 99.99% of the immaterial ones from my few decades of life in this planet.

And I have a lot more treasures to gain, and a lot more to lose as well!