How to Get Lost
My kids might never know the experience of being physically lost, and that’s a bad thing. I don’t mean the dangerous, terrifying-for-a-parent kind of lost. I mean the one where we rely on inner strength to find our way home.
They’ve grown up with GPS and phones everywhere. Siri’s voice telling us which is the best way to take and when we will arrive is familiar to them. They’ve got external support and guidance all around them.
They understand life to be mostly good and safe. I’m grateful for it, don’t get me wrong. But I worry that they aren’t exercising the inner strength to feel confident when they feel lost, to know what they are capable of when things are confusing, painful, or uncertain.
Being lost, body and soul, being in the wilderness and finding meaning there, can teach us so much.
In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit points to the wisdom in knowing we aren’t in control:
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control.”
You already know it's not just about losing our keys or needing directions. There are moments in all our lives when things feel so uncertain that we barely know who we are. Those are wilderness moments.
It’s a hard feeling for good reason. Baked deep into our DNA is the desire to understand the world and be able to control it. We have inherited that desire from our grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother many times back. You survive when you can predict when the sun comes up and which way the stars point and how to get home.
We’ve survived when we found order in the world, knowing which things keep us safe, which plants and animals heal and which harm. Order and certainty have often meant survival. And so, when uncertainty in life is powerful, it can feel like we might not make it through.
Like most things in life, the challenge is that the great lesson is often delivered in the great discomfort. That uncertainty? That feeling of being lost? That moment when life feels like wilderness? That’s where a new you is being born.
The Wilderness Can Give Us Wisdom
The wilderness is a creative place. It’s present in so much religious literature. Both Jesus and the Buddha are said to have gone into the wilderness each for 40 days alone to reflect before they could have their biggest insights and impact. In their wilderness, each of them confronts their demons, alone.
The stories say that in the wilderness they meet monsters and devils. Those voices say to them, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re special? Why don’t you go back to a safe, comfortable, and predictable life? Trade this for money, security, or power. Don’t try something new. Why not settle?”
The stories say that in the wilderness, they meet their fear that they would not survive, that their mission wouldn’t take hold, that they would fail, or be mocked or harmed. They didn’t give in. They found their meaning there in the wilderness.
That wilderness feeling can be terrible. And why not? It’s terrifying to think our health is at stake and we don’t know why. To think that we don’t know how we’ll make a living, or where we’ll live or with whom. To imagine the reality of being alone. Or failing. Being known as a fraud if we try something big instead of staying safe.
We’ll do almost anything to avoid that feeling. When faced with the wilderness, so many of us choose complacency, or worse.
Sometimes the wilderness can feel so frightening that we’ll choose toxic relationships, or soul sucking jobs over uncertainty. We’ll sometimes risk the well-being of our spirits and bodies to not have to risk the unknown.
We can be rich in loss
But as Rebecca Solnit says in her reflection on this, we can be “rich in loss” if we do it right. Being lost can make us completely present to what is before us. It can confront us with who we really are and what we are truly capable of. The goal isn’t to avoid being lost, but to learn how to be lost well.
Practice what cannot be lost
One of the keys to being prepared for those times when you will feel lost is to cultivate and carry with you something truly good and beautiful every day. It’s different for everyone. Maybe it’s true love, or your art or music, or your connection with God. If you practice holding on to something beautiful, precious, and good, you’ll have something you can never lose.
Maybe you’ve seen the video of ballerina, Marta C. Gonzalez, a talented dancer in her youth, now living with debilitating dementia. When Tchaikovsky is played for her, she begins to dance in her chair, her body picking up the memory of the beauty she practiced for years with precision. It could not be lost.
There is a beauty and centeredness that remains with her even when her own body and memory seem to betray her. She is graceful, centered, a light. Lost or not, she knows who she is. And that can be us.
If you practice connecting to something deeply precious, so much that it would move your body and soul even to think about, you will never be truly lost.
Let the wilderness highlight what matters most
Being lost can teach us what is true and dependable like nothing else. The next time you’re in the wilderness, ask yourself, “What is this teaching me about what truly matters?”
Let the wilderness reveal your depth
Finally, remember that being lost is an opportunity to surprise ourselves. There is strength you have that you have never encountered. There are things you can do, obstacles you can overcome, love you can give, that you don’t fully yet understand.
A predicable life, as tempting and comfortable as it is, does not often require us to show those skills and gifts. Being lost can reveal ourselves to us in ways nothing else can.
It might sound counterintuitive, but the only life worth living has plenty of uncertainly in it. If you love somebody, really love them, they don’t have to love you back. Do you have a vision, a big dream that animates your spirit and you want to bring it into the world? It can fail and sometimes will. If you love being alive, the body and mind you have can falter and one day will fade. One day we give it all back and we don’t know what that day is.
To live is to be in the wilderness. If you hold onto what is precious in life, if you practice something truly good, you can dance in the midst of it.
Suffering with certainty is not better than the freedom that comes with the wilderness. I hope my kids get lost, and I hope they’ve practiced living such that they find their way home, the real home. You, too.
