I got lost this week. Very lost. I was traveling home from work in Palo Alto, when I discovered I was caught in the wrong lane and I was shuffled off onto another freeway going someplace I didn’t want to go. No problem. I just took the first exit and found my way back onto the freeway going the other way. Then the trouble began. I could not find an exit back onto my original road, and as I looked for what I sought, it got foggier and foggier. Soon, I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t read the highway signs, and eventually I didn’t even know which way I was headed. I kept driving, thinking I would see something I recognized, something that would help me get oriented, but I didn’t, instead I just got further disoriented.
This Slow Lane is my meditation upon being lost. I’ve had many experiences with being lost, and it now seems that being lost is a great metaphor, or perhaps the actual truth, for the experience of trying to make it through this world. The existential truth seems to be that I have to keep going and I have very little to go on. Every step of the way I like to think I know where I am going, but I really have no idea. The more oriented I believe I am, the more lost I discover myself to be.
I remember that my grandfather used to take me with him on his driving adventures when I was a small child. We used to enjoy driving around trying to get lost, so we could find our way back home. A really good adventure meant that we had gotten really lost. Then we had the joy of a good puzzle and of a happy return home. These were happy moments that were special for my grandfather and I. I never knew what they meant to him, but I was never afraid of getting lost, and always felt I would find my way back home.
The year of my stroke, but a few months before it, I did something similar. I drove deep into a part of Northern California I had never been to. I took the highway until I got way out into the country, then I left the highway for fire roads. Eventually I was so far from civilization that I hadn’t even seen another vehicle for hours. Then I knew I was lost. I was completely alone, had no idea where I was, and could die. I had no water, food, or extra fuel. I scared myself by feeling irrationally exhilarated and at peace. I sat in my car for a while, knowing I was far enough from home that I might not make it home, and yet determined to try. Looking back, I think I was a little crazy, and in intuitive touch with the changes that were coming to alter my path.
In that case, as in my childhood, being lost was part of the thrill of living. I didn’t have that feeling when I got lost recently. I crept along highways at 25 miles an hour, endangering myself, and others, searching for some indication of which way to go. I reached such a fevered terror, such a state of lostness and aloneness, that I wanted to just drive off the road and let natural consequences take me. I was so lost, afraid and alone that I came face to face with my willingness to live. Eventually, I took responsibility for my poor broken self, figured I still wanted to live, and got myself together, got help, and got myself home. The journey was arduous, left me shaken, and reminded me how much I depend upon myself to keep the vital connections that bind me to this life.
Being lost like that has left me in some kind of altered state. I think that the experience of being so lost, and of deciding, despite my fear, vulnerability, and hopelessness, to live, to keep going, is a kind of omen. My life, or what I think of as my life, is probably taking another careening step in some new direction that I have no idea about. I am about to discover that where I am, or where I thought I was, is not really where I am at all. I am lost right here in this life.
It’s a good thing, a gift from my grandfather (I wonder if he ever knew what he was doing), that I have some good associations with getting, and being, lost. At the moment I feel overwhelmingly touched by the sense that when I am most lost, I am closest to home, on the right path at last, and when I know where I am headed, or think I do, I am most lost.
I found my way home last week, to an elder circle where we talked about loss, need, and the gifts they can bring. I made the decision to live, to get un-lost, only to return to a very human circle being confronted with the question, “How can we help each other with the many challenges associated with getting older and facing death?” This circle brought to mind the realization that all of us are likely to live long-enough to be stripped of most of the ways we have known ourselves, and our lives. We are essentially heading into being lost, and, in the estimation of this group, of being found, as the true beings of light we are.
It is funny that being so lost can help one find what is so essential.
l/d
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