I lost a key. All I had to do was not lose it, and I lost it.
The situation was simple: I wanted to ride my bike to school and my mom wouldn’t let me ride it to school unless I was responsible. In order to prove I was responsible, my mom gave me a key and said that if I could take it to school with me for one week without losing it then I could ride my bike to school. Her reasoning behind this task was that if I was going to ride my bike to school I’d have to lock it up, and I’d need a key for the bike lock. Why she didn’t think of a combination lock, I don’t know, but to me the responsibility of carrying around a key for a couple days was simple enough, even if the key didn’t unlock anything. My brother was given the same task as me so that he could obtain the same privilege.
I lost it the first day. At recess I was thinking about my task. My quest, as it were, and I checked my inventory. There was nothing in my pocket. The key was gone. Lost. All I had to do was not lose it, and within three hours of arriving at school it was gone. Fate had frowned on me. I was going to have to keep on walking to school. I was a failure. I prayed for a miracle.
At the second recess, nearly two hours after having realized I lost the key, my brother showed up, held up a small object and said, “Isn’t this your key?” Relief followed. Indeed, it was the very key that my mom had given me to be responsible for! How had my brother come upon it? My brother was a hero in that moment. The key had fallen out of my pocket on the playground, and when my brother saw a lone key sitting on the playground, he thought of my task and supposed maybe it was mine. The miracle I’d prayed for had happened. I was more careful in the next few days not to lose the key. A week later when I showed my mom I still had the key, I rode my bike to school. My mom never knew that I’d lost the key for a few hours.