LOST KEYS

I misplaced my keyring---with keys to house and car---a day or two ago. I knew they had to be somewhere on my property. I would not have been able to get back into my house without them. I have duplicates to all my keys, and was not really inconvenienced, but I became obsessed: looking in the same places over and over, convinced that the fiftieth time around, the keys would be where, on the forty-ninth time around, they hadn't been. Soon there was a path marked out on the carpet of the route I was travelling...again...and again...and again. What is that definition of insanity?  Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results?  

Suddenly I caught myself.  I realized that this is exactly how I often begin when I can't find the keys to a knot in a manuscript or a sketch dummy on which I'm working.  But I've learned that the obsessive approach is not a productive approach. If I can calm down, open my heart, relax my mind, the key to the creative problem will usually appear of its own accord...on its own timetable, of course.

Can I apply this same principle to finding my house and car keys?  Free up my mind, meditate, in the hope that the location of that elusive key ring will float to the surface?  Well, I can try...though so far, I have to admit, it hasn't worked.