Can Anyone Really Be Lost?

Here’s the funny thing about feeling lost… you can’t be lost if you don’t have a specific place in mind you are supposed to be.  

I’ve been thinking about the feeling of being ‘lost’ since the theme for this month’s blog hop was released by my writing community, Illuminate, and it struck me that I never get lost physically. I have a great sense of direction, I loved map reading as a child and I was always in charge of finding our way to the right train or remembering the way back. I have never questioned that aspect of myself.

I have often felt lost though. The lost I experience is within my inner world.

I remember one year when my mum went on a trip of some kind without me. She told me about the lady she had sat beside on the plane trying to explain the nature of a Piscean to her, in the hopes that she might find some insight into me. The woman explained the symbolism of two fish joined together by a string at their tail. She described it as the two sides of me always pulling in opposite directions, stopping me from traveling very far in either. But if both sides swam the same way, nothing would stop them, or me. The goal and challenge in my life would be to get my two fish swimming together.

That simple chance conversation has echoed back to me so many times over the years because it perfectly describes how I often feel… directionless.

Give me a goal, a clear plan that I’m excited about, and I am focused, determined, and moving. Often an unstoppable force which I’ve had to learn to temper, so my impatience and steamroller focus doesn’t hurt others along the way. It is a force that has meant I have achieved so much in my life that I am proud of.  

The problems only come when I don’t have a specific place to head for. Then the voices of everyone around me become too loud, competing for my attention, lives like sparkling diamonds to a magpie with a case of FOMO. It’s distracting and disabling, and at risk of sounding dramatic, I start to feel like I am not only lost to my purpose but I am lost to myself.  

So then, is the sensation of being lost I feel, a lack of direction, or a symptom of the culture of productivity which frowns on fallow time. The time in between projects to acknowledge what you have done, and rest before taking the next steps. The essential time in the life cycle of a field where it replenishes itself by simply doing ‘nothing’.

I say I feel lost, but a deeper exploration would suggest that it is actually a sensation of fear and urgency, the need to keep moving, keep achieving, for aren’t we taught that forward motion is everything?

We often talk about finding ourselves as though somehow we lost ourselves or worse still never became ourselves, to begin with. But again, this comes back to the idea of having a specific place/person to be. Lost suggests that the thing you seek is not here, where you are. That you need to travel, to go someplace, do something in order to find that elusive thing. Yet almost every spiritual practice says the opposite, that we need to be still, get quiet, be with ourselves and embrace this singular moment in order to connect deeply with our true selves and the nature of all things… or in other words, to find ourselves.  

So, maybe none of us are lost.  

Perhaps it is just a phrase we’ve learnt to encompass the resistance we sometimes feel to the endless need to keep moving when we don’t have a place to be other than right here.

I choose not to be lost anymore.

For me, that sensation is a signal to rest and stop the motion for a while. To lie like a fallow field and replenish myself while I observe all that has happened to bring me here, and notice the things that pull me forward without me feeling like I have to chase them.

Do you feel lost?

Where is it you are supposed to be?

This essay was written thanks to a monthly theme from Illuminate, a writing community from The Kindred Voice.

Read more stories on ‘LOST’ from the other Illuminate members:

Death and a Garbage Can: The World's Shortest Autopsy by Liz Russell

Carrying My Invisible Baggage by Crystal James

This Way Toward Disaster by Laci Hoyt

Where I Cannot See, I Am. by Leesha Mony

Getting Lost in Motherhood by Christine Carpenter