A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

Lost, these people I talked to helped me understand, was mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.

It’s not about being lost but about trying to lose yourself.

Justice, a book on classical lore asserted, stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self. It made going to hell seem different.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.”

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far.

I don’t know if stability and security bored her,

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I’d left it at age fourteen. A quarter century had passed, and I still wasn’t out of it, in my dreams.

This resonated with me so deeply. I too still wander my childhood home, though it's been gone from me 30+ years. I dream of it frequently, of returning and all my family, long dead, have been there the entire time.