I want to tell you about my adventure with a ring and how it taught me some valuable lessons about life.

A few years ago, my wife and I spent a day visiting my wife's brother and parents.

Her brother lives by a beautiful deep water lake and her parents live by a river not far away.

We had a great time, hiking, swimming, and just relaxing.

On our way home, we stopped for coffee. As I walked into the coffee shop, my heart sank.

I lost my wedding ring, I told my wife. I held up my bare finger. Now she was as upset as I was.

My wife and I love each other very much,

and our wedding bands, each with a personal inscription, symbolize our bond. And now the chances of ever seeing my ring again, given how active we had been, looked exceedingly grim.

The easiest thing to do at this point would have been to give up

and accept the reality that the ring was lost forever. My wife and I decided otherwise. First lesson,

never panic. Stay calm and in that state of calm, figure out a plan. There's almost always a solution to your problem.

And even if there's not, just the process of putting together a plan

will settle your nerves, while panic never works.

We began by combing through the photos and video clips we'd taken to see

if we could narrow the timeline.

The first piece of good news was that we found a photo taken after my lake swim and my ring

was still on my hand. This was a gigantic statistical victory. At least we knew that the ring was not

irretrievably lost in a deep water lake. We proceeded to look at the

photos and videos taken at my in-law's chalet to hopefully rule out the possibility that it was

lost in the river. The river's current is so strong that it serves as a sort of swimming treadmill.

If you swim against the current, you end up staying pretty much in one

spot. This is precisely what I was doing in several video clips, one of which captured the exact

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