New Year & Lost Socks

The new year always arrives with a kind of quiet insistence. It doesn’t knock loudly like a holiday or demand attention the way a birthday does. It simply shows up, standing there in the doorway of our lives, asking us to notice what has been carried forward and what might be ready to be folded differently. For me, this noticing often begins in the most ordinary of places: the laundry room.

Laundry has a way of marking time. Loads come and go with the rhythm of weeks and seasons, with the changing sizes of clothes and the subtle shifts in what we wear when. In our house, laundry is not my primary responsibility. My spouse and my teenager have claimed it as their domain, and honestly, I am grateful. They know the machines, the settings, the systems. I mostly just trust that if I put something in the hamper, it will eventually make its way back to me, clean and folded and somehow reappearing where it belongs.

That trust is tested most often with socks.

We have a decorative box that sits on a shelf in our laundry room, intentionally chosen to make the reality it contains feel slightly more charming. It is the place where lost socks go. Single socks. Lonely socks. Socks that have clearly lived a life and survived a wash cycle but have somehow lost their partner along the way. The box fills slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a record of small, unfinished stories. Every so often, someone will dig through it, hopeful, curious, perhaps just a little desperate.

Finding a matching sock in that box feels like a small victory. It is a moment of triumph that far outweighs its practical importance. Two socks reunited. Order restored. A tiny piece of the universe snapping back into alignment. It is ridiculous, of course, to feel such satisfaction over something so small. And yet, it is real. The joy is disproportionate, and maybe that’s the point.

There are moments when I am certain I am running out of clothes. The closet or drawer looks sparse. Options are limited. I start doing mental math about how many days I can stretch what’s left. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, more appears. Clean. Folded. Hung. Returned to rotation. I didn’t ask. I didn’t rush anyone. I simply trusted the process, and somehow, what I needed found its way back to me.

It is not always on my timeline.

That is perhaps the hardest part. Dividing labor for tasks teaches patience, especially when you’re not the one doing it. You learn that control is an illusion, that hovering doesn’t speed things up, and that worrying rarely produces results. Things come back when they come back. In the meantime, you adapt. You make do. You choose a different pair. You wait.

My daughter understands this better than most. She doesn’t mind wearing mismatched socks. It doesn’t bother her to start the day with stripes on one foot and polka dots on the other. To her, it’s creative, expressive, a quiet rebellion against unnecessary rules. And yet, even as she pulls on two socks that clearly did not begin life as a pair, she will say, with a hopeful shrug, that she hopes the matching one eventually finds its way back into her drawer.

She trusts that it will.

That trust is not naïve. It’s not rooted in denial. It’s built on experience. She has seen socks disappear and return. She has watched the box magically give up its treasures weeks or even months later. She knows that just because something is missing now doesn’t mean it is gone forever. Sometimes it is simply in the middle of the process.

There is something profoundly grounding about that belief.

The new year often invites us to inventory our lives, to notice what feels missing. Energy. Clarity. Hope. Direction. We open our internal drawers and wonder how they got so empty. We question whether what we need will ever come back around again. And like the laundry, the timing rarely feels ideal. We want everything restored neatly and immediately, preferably by January second.

But life, like laundry, operates on a different schedule.

Things are in motion even when we can’t see them. Effort is happening somewhere else, in hands not our own. Cycles are turning quietly in the background. Just because we are down to our last clean pair doesn’t mean the rest are gone. It may simply mean they are still tumbling, still being sorted, still waiting their turn to be folded.

The box of lost socks is a reminder that not everything is resolved right away. Some things linger in-between. Some things need time. And some things will surprise us by reappearing when we have almost given up looking for them.

When a matching pair is finally reunited, there is a brief pause of gratitude. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just a moment of satisfaction and relief. It is enough. The sock goes back into the drawer, whole again, ready to be worn as it was intended.

The new year doesn’t promise instant wholeness. It doesn’t guarantee that everything we’ve misplaced will show up on demand. But it does invite us to trust the process, to believe that what matters has a way of returning, even if it takes longer than we hoped.

So I enter this year with the quiet faith of someone who has lived with a box of lost socks. I know that mismatches are sometimes necessary. I know that waiting is part of the deal. And I know that small victories still count.

Somewhere, right now, the things we need are making their way back into rotation. And when they arrive, it will feel like a victory worth celebrating.

Happy New Year friends!