On navigating lostness
Owning my feeling of lostness allowed me to see myself exploring unfamiliar places. But it took a while to get there.
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In the months following my separation, I remember vividly waking with a profound sense of uncertainty. I was waking in a room that was new to me, that included a kitchen, office, living room. It was a room my children could not enter because they were not in the same house as me. Nothing grounds me more than my children’s love because nothing feels more familiar than their love. And I mean “familiar” in the most literal way possible. I would wake at strange hours. 2.30am. 3.15am. The anxiety was there. Where am I? Is this really my life? A light pole outside my window would cast strange shadows on the blinds. I would check the clock on my phone again and again, realizing each time that I hadn’t actually fallen back asleep.
My co-parent and I had gotten to the place that John O’Donahue describes tragically: “Even with the best will in the world, it can emerge that two people would destroy each other, and even their children, if they were to remain together” (Beauty 166). This was new territory for both of us, and I could imagine but only imagine the terror she felt, too. Mine felt crushing, in part because feeling lost came with its own set of judgments. A song from my childhood—“I once was lost but now am found”—looked over its glasses at me while holding a gavel.
I once was found but now I’m lost.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Anxiety billowed up from my uncertainty, and shame fanned the flames. I wasn’t supposed to feel lost. Lost was spiritually depraved territory. Not just unsavory or unwanted but impermissible. I wasn’t allowed to feel lost, right?
The same summer I got divorced I befriended an Irish poet named Pádraig who recommended Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She told the stories of pioneers who were captured by native peoples, of Spanish conquistadors who found themselves among the only surviving few in a land they didn’t know or have maps to navigate, of painters who developed a special hue of blue for their canvases. All communicate the same thing. They are singular visions of lostness. She told stories from her childhood, of wandering vacant fields and woods and learning to find her way home.
These stories redeemed lostness, and in that redemption redeemed me.
New territory came with new friends, and Andrea was a fellow lost soul wandering her own wilderness. On a video call, we found a shared love of Solnit’s Field Guide when she referenced a passage that I knew intuitively she meant. To her surprise I was able to turn straight to the page, not because I had memorized the page number but because my book practically falls open to these two pages. They face each other in my paperback, with marginal notes and more lines underlined than not. They form for me the heart of Solnit’s text: “Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigation, skills of survival and escape…But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle reals. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyched, a readiness to deal with what comes next” (80).
It’s damn near sacred at this point.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
My readiness to deal with what came next began with the most difficult admission: I had become a different person. Whatever had been brewing unseen for a decade or so—the things that my semi-retired Jewish therapist for 6 sessions in early 2019 had discerned—emerged. He saw that I was ready to push against my childhood upbringing not because I detested or hated my childhood upbringing but that I valued it for what it was designed to do: offer a container for me to break out of. There’s the bird in the egg before there’s the bird in flight.“Some people,” writes Solnit, “inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch.”
Did my breaking out have to happen in the way that it did? No, and I wish I would have had the guts to break the container differently. I hurt a lot of people including myself, and the wreckage is still present for me, too close for me to talk about.
Even so, several stars aligned in the season of lostness. One was hearing that the human brain registers “error” or “wrong turn” when experiencing one of lostness’ other monikers: uncertainty. I found this titbit while writing for a leadership coach some time in the winter of 2023-24. The second star was reading Dacher Keltner’s study of Awe that came out in January of 2023, which I heard about through Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast. I began to pay attention to awe as an emotion, not as some abstract idea but a presence to be felt and documented, measured by chills on my arms or on the back of my neck. I learned to tell myself when I felt lost that I was simply feeling uncertain, that I had done nothing wrong. “This is simply new territory, Michael, and you’re only limited by your imagination.” I realized that if I could enduire my uncertainty long enough–without trying to escape it, if I could face it, I could then ask the curious question “What if…”
What if I can learn how to market myself on LinkedIn?
What if I could double my income to cover all my financial responsibilities?
What if I could take the skills I had added in academics to be used outside academics?
Plato’s wax tablet metaphor floats the idea that our imagination expands and limits our vision because its ability is expanded and limited by our experiences. In other words, our imagination can only expand its power by encountering new experiences. Those new experiences are the uncertain spaces I find myself in. As painful as uncertainty and lostness can be, facing them with genuine curiosity—”What if”—finds me in a whole new wilderness where being lost suddenly becomes “exploration.” Think about it. Explorers are never lost. Or they are always lost. Lostness is part of their being.
I am fully aware that I’ve been given exactly what I need to get exactly what I want if only I have the courage to be curious.
