Today, I want to share a beautiful story attributed to Franz Kafka that carries a powerful lesson about love and loss.

It is said that Franz Kafka, the renowned writer, once came across a distraught little girl in the park. She was crying at the loss of her beloved doll. Kafka helped her look for the doll, but they weren’t successful. He arranged to meet her the following day in the same spot, and this time too, they weren’t able to find it. Kafka then handed the girl a letter — written for her, he said, by the doll. It said, “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write to you of my adventures.”

This letter turned out to be the beginning of many. Whenever Kafka and the girl met he read her these carefully composed letters from the imagined adventures of her beloved doll. The girl was comforted.

When this series of meetings came to an end, Kafka presented the girl with a new doll. This doll looked very different from the doll that was lost. An attached letter explained, “My travels have changed me…”

Many years later, it is said, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice of the replacement doll. In it was written, “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

What a remarkable idea. I am reminded of a quote I have cherished from Rumi: “Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

Years ago, I decided to leave the field of mathematics because I felt pulled toward doing more socially relevant things. It was an emotionally charged loss for me, because I had such a deep love for the subject. And while I miss doing pure mathematics, I found myself over time using the constructs of that field — formulating axioms or core principles, logically structuring an argument, searching for hidden patterns in things — to inform almost every problem I’ve sought to solve in life since then. So mathematics came back to me in another form, as a guidepost for so much more in my life than just the proving of theorems and corollaries.

Looking back at your life, what is something you had dearly loved but then came to lose one day? If you step back from that loss, can you see how, over time, love came back to you in other forms? What strength and wisdom does Kafka’s and Rumi’s wisdom give you to cope with the losses you will inevitably encounter tomorrow?

Warmly,
Hitendra

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