Let’s get lost
// April 13th, 2010 // learning
I’ve always both feared and been facinated by feeling lost.
As a teenager a favorite short story of mine was by Joe Haldeman. In the story a mathematician tricks the devil. After finding out there was no where the devil couldn’t go or find, the mathematician commands the devil to “get lost!” As a teenager, I chuckled over that one for a long time. Sort of silly but it stuck in my head.
Growing up, I had a lot of experience getting lost; my father loved to take short cuts, and somehow or another they didn’t ever quite work. As a boy scout and a teenager in general I really enjoyed backpacking and hiking in general and going off the trail was always fun, seeing how lost I could get and yet still find my way back. Seems that I was always able to do so (at least so far….).
Though, one of the greatest experiences of my life happened while I was a 16 year old exchange student in Ecuador. It was my last week in the country and I had just gotten to Quito, the night before, to stay with a new host family for a few days before returning to the U.S.
I was dropped off in the city center, at some mall or such, to meet a friend, or fellow exchange student, I really can’t remember anymore. But I must have gotten the time or place wrong because no one was there. The people dropping me off had already left and the person I was supposed to meet was supposed to be taking me back to where I was staying.
I, of course, didn’t know where that was, all I knew was what there house looked like, that the house was somewhere up the mountain from where I was, that I could see a billboard shaped like a pack of Marlboros (with smoke spewing out of an extended “lit” cigarette), and the way Cotopaxi looked from in front of the house. That was all I knew about where I was supposed to get to.
I don’t know why but I wasn’t worried, I just started up the mountain and expected that I would little by little wander my way closer to where I was staying and somehow find the place. I walked for 6 hrs across the city slowly getting closer and I found myself completely engrossed in the expereience the new sites, sounds of Quito’s neighborhoods and the prospect of getting “home”.
I finally got there and never told anyone just said I had a great time down in the city.
More then anything else I had experienced that summer in Ecuador, that afternoon is the most important to me. Ever since, if I have the time and I am in a new city, I just learn a few land marks and then just throw myself out into the city and see what I can see.
That sense of adventure doesn’t always translate into my ability to deal with the emotional sense of being lost, or in losing my way. At times, as a parent, an entrepreneur or just as a person, I feel lost, not know what I should be doing. Or worse, I spend so much energy on just trying to not feel lost and I end up feeling worse.
I fear not knowing what to do… and that leaves me both lost and in a cycle of fearing becoming even more lost.
Only occassionly do I stop and ask myself what’s to fear about being lost. I’ve been lost before, truly, seriously lost and yet I lived. Being emotionally lost, while sucking, isn’t horrible and if I don’t allow the aspects of fear to take over, has lead to some pretty decent introspection.
So why do I fear feeling lost? I don’t know, it just seems to be part of my nature.
So more importantingly, how do I learn to become more comfortable with feeling lost?
I’ve been reading “taking the leap” by Pema Chordron and in the second chapter, she writes about learning to stay in the place we feel lost in so it gradually loses it’s threat. The way to practice staying is to pause when feeling lost and to take three breaths and just listen to your environment.
The funny thing about this advice us that the breathing reminds me that I have been lost and have found my way. As usual, finding my way usually takes becoming calm, understanding where I want to go, then determining the way I’m going to get there, before actually mapping out the specific directions I need to take. Then it takes just getting started and checking on my progress readily enough to reorient myself and then not stopping until I’m where I want to be.
Funny how what I learned getting lost in Quito as a 16 year old boy is so relevant to both being a better business person but more importantly a better person.
So maybe the mathematician was doing the devil a favor when he told him to get lost. Who knows what the Devil learned on his journey?
… and hopefully he was listening to some Chet Baker while doing so.
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