Unlost

One Saturday morning in the summer when I was about ten years old I managed to get lost, intentionally, by wandering around in a part of town where I’d never been before and knew absolutely nothing about. I took a bus and got off at a foreign-looking street corner and walked for a long time, turning corners this way and that, and finally I had no idea where I’d gotten off the bus, no idea at all of the direction to my neighborhood and home. For a long time I recognized nothing, not a house or building or store, and there was something almost ominous about street signs with names on them I’d never even heard of.

Of course I knew that I was still in my home town and I wasn’t really lost, like being alone in a forest at midnight, or in a desert without food or water. But if you’re ten years old and ‘don’t know where you are’, you’re going to feel at least a little uneasy (just enough, as I remember). And I had decided early on that if I had to ask for help from an adult about how to get home, the whole day would be a failure for sure. The point was to get really good and lost, and then find my way back on my own. If I could lose myself, I should be able to find myself, whether that made sense or not.

I’ve always thought of that day’s adventure as an attempt to actually care about my life, to provide myself with some inner excitement and therefore something that truly seemed important to me. By late afternoon, by the time I saw a bus coming that turned out to be the one that would take me back, unlost again, I really wanted to go home, almost as much as I didn’t want to give up and ask for help unless I absolutely had to.

We do like to know where we are in the scheme of things. It’s certainly not a trivial question, coming with the territory, so to speak. And it’s not just a matter of familiarity, as it obviously is with my story above. To me now, that I’m located in the USA is just as real and important as my location in Boulder, Colorado. One can zoom in or out with ease. It seems to be all over the place, just a matter of scale. Here’s an image titled The Green Green Lights of Home.