One morning, hurtling from my desk toward the photocopier, I passed a roomful of colleagues just about to start a meeting, There was someone I needed to talk to. I saw immediately that he wasn’t among them, but I put my head in the door before they could begin, and in a very loud, urgent voice, I said, “Has anyone seen David?”

There was a moment of stunned incomprehension, which to my amazement, quickly dissolved into table-thumping laughter. My comic timing must have been impeccable, because the whole room was soon helpless, repeating what I had said and generally behaving like the pig-ignorant fools other people seem to be when the joke is at our expense. I looked at them blankly, the truth dawning as I looked. “Has anyone seen David?” might seem an innocuous question in most organizations, but I happened to be the only David who worked under that particular roof. I realized the forlorn and public stupidity of my request and forced myself, after a wide-eyed moment, to laugh with them. Inside, I was dying.

I was looking for David, all right, and I couldn’t find him. In fact, I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I was looking for a David who had disappeared under a swampy morass of stress and speed. 

—David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage to Identity