Let Us Be Lost Always

With my baby daughter drifting to sleep in a car seat in the back, I edged beyond the stop sign, left blinker signaling my intended direction, about to turn towards home. Almost without thinking, I swiftly pulled the car’s signaling arm up to the off position and instead guided the car straight through the intersection, cruising down a road I had never travelled before towards an area I was unfamiliar with, ready to get lost.

My wife was at work, so I, as a teacher on summer vacation, was watching our daughter, and I had gotten in the habit of taking her for meandering drives through new areas, usually traversing roads I would describe as that indefinable area between suburban and rural. Space to think and space to be delighted by treasures of nature or human cultivation (a pleasant garden or the unique architecture of some stranger’s home).

For much of my life I have been enthralled by the idea of lostness. Not the kind of lostness that is associated with despair and failure but rather the kind associated with unknowing, mystery, and, with a bit of good fortune, discovery. Being lost on purpose. That’s essentially what is required of us in a world in which everything has already been named, or at least so it feels.

There is no terra incognita. Expeditions have already arrived at the North and South Poles and every space in between. We’ve unearthed ancient civilizations and extinct creatures. We’ve conquered nearly every square inch of the globe, and we’ve un-wilded all the wild places.

"Swimming hole - Bright Angel Creek - Grand Canyon North Rim" by Al_HikesAZ is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Nowadays we look to the stars and dream of outer space, “the final frontier,” because, in our best moments, we are innately and insatiably curious; we’re all just overgrown children who, upon discovering that the monsters under the bed were just a misshapen pile of clothes all along, secretly wish the monsters would return so that we can go on having grand adventures and dreaming up nasty, wonderful tales where we can be heroes once again.

But the author of Ecclesiastes, writing over two thousand years ago, was already saying that there is no new thing under the sun (though I would argue he or she had plenty of newness to discover back then). Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

When I was a young boy, I lived in a small apartment with my parents and younger brother. On one side of our apartment complex was the town that I was familiar with; it’s where I went to kindergarten. On the other side, though, was a vast field. For a while, that field was the edge of my world. There was a slight hill, and I couldn’t see over it, so I’d imagine a hundred thousand possibilities on the other side of that hill. Being a timid boy, I never ventured further out than I had permission to go, but it was always there, the border of everything I knew.

We grow up, though, and find that the mysterious woods at the back of our grandparents’ house merely abuts the subdivision on the other side. The maps have all been filled in. Our world grows smaller, more recognizable, more comfortable. So in lieu of that sobering realization, sometimes we just have to go get lost a little. And not take a map. And not ask Siri and Google every inane question that pops into our brains. Let unknowing be unknowing, and rest and relish in what little mystery we can muster up.

A funny thing happened one late July day when my baby daughter wasn’t with me. It was my very first day off all summer when I was neither watching her nor did I have any other responsibilities. I had dropped her off at the daycare she had been attending two days a week (up to that point, I had inevitably filled in those two days a week with all the errands I was unable to accomplish before), and I was anxiously looking forward to the small bit of freedom. I was on the verge of rushing back home to my favorite study nook, something I had been craving for months, a chance to do something I love: read and write!

But in my car on the way home I was hit by that subtle allure of getting lost again. This desire surprised me because I had been planning to take advantage of every limited spare minute I had to read and write. Don’t waste time! I thought. You can go explore with your daughter on another day!

In fact, I had to stop the car as I argued with myself about what I should do, but eventually, my inner-explorer won out. This time, though, I chose to get lost outside of my vehicle. I parked at a favorite conservation area, a gem (in an otherwise overdeveloped suburban sprawl) of over a thousand acres of winding webs of trails plunging through forests and alongside cool streams.

The conservation area was familiar, but there were trails that were not. It wasn’t perfect, but it was my way of getting lost on purpose. So I rushed into the woods down a path I had traveled once or twice before, and as I expected, I soon found a small trail branching off.

"Mountain Stream" by jasonb42882 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I have discovered from many years of hiking that upon deviating from the main trail, you can quickly place yourself in a maze of winding wooded paths that can be disorienting and cause you to get lost. Exactly what I wanted.

I followed diverging path after diverging path until I found myself quite alone and standing in a dried up creek bed consisting of descending steps of rock. It made for a perfect seat, so there I planted myself.

Yes, perhaps I was merely in a relatively small, Missouri conservation area, but as best as I could given my circumstances, I had “lost” myself there and found a small space of uninhabited silence. I could hear no voices, and the drone of the interstate a few miles away—though inescapable—was only faint.

I had a Black & Mild cigarillo with me, an infrequent vice that I enjoy indulging in when I am in a reflective mood, so I lit up and immersed myself in that shady, natural solitude. My very own secret fortress, away from the encroachments of the modern and mystery-less world.

For me, there’s always been strange life in the solitude of the woods. To borrow the idea of other writers, sometimes it feels as though the trees are sleeping and the gods and goddesses of old are merely waiting to be awakened. That sort of wildness, though mild, always tinges the edges of my vision in the woods. So it’s a place I go to get lost.

Fortuitously, that day I happened to have a copy of Mary Oliver’s essay “Upstream” which I pulled out of my backpack, not realizing just how appropriate it would be for all that I had been feeling and for what I was doing in that moment. In her essay, Oliver reflects upon walking upstream, away from the protective watch of her parents, eventually getting herself lost. “If this was lost,” she remarks, “let us all be lost always.” The prize for her lostness? An opening of the heart among the magic of the natural world.

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again,” she notes later in the essay, “comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.”

Unlike Oliver’s stream, mine that day was dried out, and I was neither moving up nor downstream, but I had the same idea—to move further and deeper into the woods, to get lost and away from people. I like how Oliver presents the need to intentionally reject responsibilities. Reclaiming a life of getting lost in the right way means taking off those heavy coats of adult burdens. It’s a conscious act, a force of will. In a world that defines value and self-worth by busyness, we must become students of unhaste, of time wasted. We must learn to reject toxic definitions of success. The door to adventuresome lostness will never be open to us until we choose to walk Frost’s “road less travelled.”

Mary Oliver ends her essay with her most important command:

Teach the children.... Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

My daughter may have been napping in her car seat while I got us lost in the many zig-zagging roads around us, oblivious to my intentional wanderings, but when we learn to get lost on purpose, that becomes a legacy to our children. I believe every person, sadly, will experience the pain of worldly burdens, of those many-layered and heavy coats. But if I help my child get lost in the right sort of way, teaching her to make her own map, to unname and then rename a new terra incognita, perhaps when she grows up, she will unstick more quickly when the troubles of life try to hold her feet in cement. Maybe she will be numbered among those who take our civilization to new galaxies. Or maybe, someday, she’ll simply park her car, stumble into the woods like her father taught her, and get lost in some hidden, shady grove.