Last week my husband, Steve, lost his house keys for roughly 12 hours. He looked in all the obvious places: the key dish we each have, pants’ pockets, backpacks, jackets and even shoes. Then he went on to less obvious places: under furniture, the garden where he’d been weeding, the garage.

After a few hours of searching, he enlisted my help. I retraced the places he looked, should the keys be hiding in plain sight. I removed sofa cushions. I looked in kitchen cabinets. Hours later, we went about our day thinking the keys would miraculously appear. They didn’t.

Plan B

By evening, Steve had a plan to search the perimeter of the house one more time in the morning before getting another set of keys made. I searched the internet where I go with all life’s questions and discovered two things: losing or misplacing keys is incredibly common (it’s right at the top of the list along with TV remotes) and most importantly, they usually turn up. Stress and limited thinking are the enemies of finding lost keys.

I also saw warnings from security-minded people that if house keys could’ve been lost outside, best to change the locks or re-key them. I calmed my paranoia by imagining that if Steve couldn’t find lost keys in the weeds, the chances of those with criminal intentions spotting them were slim.

I did believe, however, that we could crack this case if we approached the problem with calm and clear heads. I began asking Steve questions about the day before he realized his keys were missing. When we got to the part of “garbage pickup”, he ran downstairs and found his keys at the bottom of our kitchen trash bin. The interesting part of finding the keys in the trash is that this wasn’t the first time we’ve accidently tossed things in either the trash or recycling bins, but neither one of us thought to look there immediately.

Something similar happened to my cousin a number of years ago while we were attending a family celebration. He was about to leave for the airport in his rental car when he realized he didn’t have the car keys. He frantically searched his suitcase and all around his hotel room without luck. He contacted the car rental agency and was about to employ their (expensive) solution when he thought to check the pockets of a pair of trousers that he was certain he hadn’t worn. There they were!

The Streetlight Effect

Perhaps you’ve heard the story (or a version of this story) about the police officer who spots a man anxiously searching under a streetlight. The officer asks the man what he’s looking for; the man tells the officer he’s lost his keys. The officer asks if he’s sure he lost his keys under the streetlight. The man replies, “No I lost them in the park across the street but the light is better here.”

Searching for lost keys is a metaphor for how we go about solving life’s problems.  In the recent saga of my husband’s lost keys, we neglected to consider past behavior as a predictor of future behavior; in my cousin’s case, he eliminated possibilities without investigating; and in the streetlight story, the man chose the easiest, most well-lit approach.

Lessons Learned

When we take a bird’s eye view of lost-key stories and problem-solving missteps in general, we can extrapolate some important lessons for cracking life’s thorny issues. Here are a few of these lessons:

1.     Stay calm when facing your own lost keys. Use whatever centering strategies work for you: deep breathing, a stroll in nature, mantras. Psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, has shared this mantra to help cope with stressful situations: “May I meet this moment fully, may I meet it as a friend.”

2.     Avoid making assumptions about where resolutions might lie. Maintain a beginner’s mind —consider all possibilities.

3.     Enlist the aid of others who may help you see solutions you were neglecting.

4.     Consider solutions that live in the dark, overlooked places. Avoid easy answers just because you can readily see them. The best answers often reside in the crevices of your mind.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

—Albert Einstein