Get Lost

(to be found)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of getting lost. 

It started a while back with this quote I found in a book called This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire by Nick Flynn: “John Cassavetes once proposed that when a character can’t find his way home, that’s where the story begins.” 

I have a bit of a problem with these little gems of wisdom concerning stories and what makes a good story. There’s that famous one about how stories always fall into one of two categories: either a person leaves home or a stranger comes to town. I always find it tempting to put stories into boxes like this, and maybe it’s mostly true, but surely there must be many exceptions. But maybe when you’re talking about traditional storytelling, old folktales, mainstream blockbuster movies, the rules apply. The Wizard of Oz, for example. For sure the story starts when she can’t find her way home. (Also, a person leaves home and a stranger comes to town.)

But what about experimental stories like the movie I just rewatched, Adaptation, a somewhat autobiographical movie about a screenwriter trying to write an adaptation of a book but keeps getting writer’s block so instead writes about his struggle of trying to write an adaptation. Well, yes, there is a scene, although it is near the end of the movie, where he is truly lost- so completely far from who he was at the beginning of the movie in a way that he can never go back. He has been lost the entire movie, but in this scene he is lost in a transformational way, a way that lets you know that he’s actually going to be alright.

So, maybe the quote is accurate, as long as you’re flexible about the meaning of the word “lost.” 

And then yesterday I was reading this other book, called In Praise of Paths by Torbjorn Ekelund. It’s a book exploring the history and meaning of paths, as well as describing the author’s own love of walking and specific paths that have shaped his development. At one point in the book he decides to go off-path, when he and a friend plan a hike in wild country, vowing to not look at a map, GPS, or even a watch for two full days to see if they can navigate using just the land around them. They get incredibly lost. He is somewhat disheartened by the fact that humans as a species have lost touch with their ability to navigate without gadgets, and also deeply changed by just the experience of being so thoroughly lost. He quotes the German philosopher Walter Benjamin who said, “To be lost is to be fully present.” 

On the next page he asks, “When do you know with certainty that you are lost? When the world has become so large that you no longer recognize it.” 

This led me to wonder, have I ever been truly lost? I thought of being separated from my  family at a museum in Toronto when I was nine, I thought of hopping a Greyhound headed East from Seattle at age twenty-one without a real sense of where I was headed. I thought of traveling through Europe with Benny, getting turned around in those circular towns, I thought of that feeling when you wake up in a strange place and don’t remember where you are. I realized that it doesn’t feel like getting lost if that’s what you set out to do- it just feels like exploring. 

I think there is one time that I would consider a true experience of being lost: when Benny and I were on that Europe trip and we had taken a train from Switzerland to Cologne, Germany. This was pre-smart phone so all that summer we would find a hostel or internet cafe and book a room at a hostel for the upcoming night, then just jot down the info and do our best to find it. Often we would choose the cheapest hostels which usually ended up being located outside of town. The hostel we had booked in Cologne turned out to be extremely remote, an hour bus ride outside of the city. We arrived at the hostel late, around 11 pm, and we were past curfew so we couldn’t get in. We were stranded in some strange area of German countryside at night with no cell phone, no clue of what to do. I remember we were both scared and started to get paranoid- we saw a white van with tinted windows parked on a deserted side road somewhere and got worried, like we were going to get abducted or something. 

We kept walking along the rural highway until we came to a 7-11, a glowing beacon of hope. We went in and asked the cashier for directions to anywhere we could stay and as we were talking with him, a man behind us overheard and offered us a guest room at his house. He seemed nice enough and we didn’t have much choice, so we followed him home. He turned out to be a wonderful person, a dentist with a sweet Turkish wife and two young kids. We stayed there two nights and during the day he took the day off of work to drive us around and give us a tour of Cologne. His wife laid out delicious spreads of food and made special Turkish tea. Benny and I had many incredible experiences that summer but I think we both felt that getting lost in Germany was the real heart of the adventure. 

Is it even possible to get lost anymore, now that we carry a GPS around with us at all times? Remember when you had to pull over and ask a stranger for directions? Remember sketching out a route on a napkin for someone? I think that even though it’s almost impossible to get physically lost these days (I’m about to get deep here), we are actually more lost than ever. Possibly because we know the precise and fastest route from point A to point B. Modern life feels so jumbled and confusing, I think because we’ve lost touch with our inner compass. I think, like Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, if you’re feeling lost the answer isn’t to orient yourself towards home. What you should do is get more lost, get as far away from home as possible. Get so far that you no longer recognize your world. Only then will you have changed enough that you can answer the question that your old self was asking.

I challenge you to find little ways to get lost. Art is a good way to get lost because there’s no real blueprint. Go to a part of town you’ve never explored and try not to look at your phone. Try to make muffins without a recipe. Go to sleep in a place that’s not your bed. Watch a foreign movie without subtitles. Walk slowly through your yard with your eyes closed. That’s your homework. Report back.