Last fall when I reached California after four days of driving, I posted on Facebook that I’d driven 1, 928 miles and not made a single wrong turn. This was, as those who know me well can attest, a significant accomplishment. It might not be hyperbole to say that I get lost nearly as often as I go out.
As a new college graduate before the days of GPS and Internet maps I learned my way around around Minneapolis and St. Paul by getting lost, often in my search for one place finding another that I would need to know within a matter of days.The ready access to GPS locations seems to make me worse at finding my way now, relying more on the unrelenting voice from my dashboard than a simple effort to pay attention to road signs and landmarks.
It’s not so terrible really, being lost. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit considers not only the virtue of losing oneself, but the necessity of it.
In [Walter] Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse ‘los, ‘ meaning the disbanding of an army and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so. (Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, pp. 6-7)
A sales clerk once lifted my child-sized body up to the counter where I sat in my winter coat and hat, red rubber overshoes dangling off my feet, and waited with me for my mother to answer the call over the department store loudspeaker to come retrieve her lost one. I imagine that I had wandered inside a clothing rack while my mother shopped and was disoriented when I emerged on the other side. I don’t recall feeling lost; it seems the clerk was more concerned than I was. I had a fondness for being under and inside things—reading under tables, sleeping inside closets and under the bed.
Perhaps I knew a little of what Virginia Woolf knew, without really knowing it, about a person’s need to lose oneself to the wide world at times. Solnit quotes from an essay by Woolf:
As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room. . . . Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give one the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.
And then there was the time in the third grade when I became detached from my friends at the nature center during a field trip. Again I’m not sure I ever even knew I was lost. I only knew that I’d been found some time later by an irritable teacher who escorted me to the bus with her class, a younger grade, and I remember the sting of being stared at by other kids who didn’t get lost and seemed to consider me like a curiosity in a zoo cage there in the seat behind the teacher all the way back to school. I remember thinking if this is what it was to be found, to be scolded by grownups and peered at by children, it wouldn’t have been so bad to stay at the nature center until dark, left alone to meander the park trails and my own thoughts.
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, nor to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. (Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p. 14)
More often than not, while I may have appreciated the state of being lost—of being in a place free of the usual intrusion from that wider world—I’ve arrived there by accident. Rebecca Solnit sticks a pin on the roadmap at the place where it all begins: “You get lost out of a desire to be lost.”
Photo by Jrm Llvr, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.
Browse more Rebecca Solnit Get lost in an Artist Date
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Elizabeth Marshall says
Your prose holds me. Rocks my imagination and takes me to a place of wandering. Lost in your words. This book is asking me to read it. A mysterious and sincere invitation to wonder.
Will Willingham says
I have to admit, as much as I love Solnit’s work, and really loved the first half of this one, I’m having a little trouble finishing. She seems to have taken her own words to heart and it feels as though she is wandering about… Still, an excellent book. 🙂
Elizabeth Marshall says
Now that is just like a wanderer. 🙂 and she seems to invite us to wonder about and explore a lifestyle of wandering and getting lost. Finding our way back may be in yet another book. I will give the first half a fair go. Came find me if I seem to have disappearred.
Sandra Wirfel says
I cannot tell you how often I think about getting lost, changing up the pace of the world I live in, and yet, duty calls, responsibility is necessary, someday, someway I will find and opportunity to get lost, I often think the best way to do it is just jump in the car and drive…no looking back…I will add this title to my books I want to read list…
Will Willingham says
Solnit talks about how in times past getting lost was really not so tragic because people traveled with fewer time constraints and typically well provisioned for long journeys anyway. So maybe you don’t have to look back, but be sure you have a little something to eat in case you don’t get back before dark. 😉
Sandra Wirfel says
MAPS
Getting
Lost
Will
Help
You
Find
Yourself
But
I
Would
Rather
Have
A
Map.
Y14M5D1 SLW
From my collection, I felt it fit the category of Getting Lost.
Elizabeth Marshall says
Sandra thanks for sharing. I find the linear formatting perfect. Kind of longitude-ish. Well done.
Sandra Wirfel says
Thanx Elizabeth, the longitudish format came from L.L. Barkat’s Jealous stack Poems. I used the Stack Poetry Theme for my 2014 writing goal for poetry, and had so much fun that I am continuing the form for 2015, with an ultimate goal of 1000 Stack poems by 31 Dec 2015.
Richard Maxson says
An enchanting post. Maybe there is something in us all that wants to be lost. Like Elizabeth, now I have to read this book you presented it so well.
When I was 9-10 years old, I lived and worked on a farm in the summer. I loved to get lost in the corn fields (not like Children of the Corn lost). I guess these were early artist dates for me. They still inspired many years later.
Lost Among the Bones (Double Reverse Acrostic)
Counting failed always, the first gleaming eyE
Of a fox or coon, screech owl, or deer screaM
Raised the hair on my neck and stopped me. I
Never failed to fear those yellow eyes; thaT
Fear was the reason in those nights―the mooN
Inches from the earth—yellow at first, as if I
Envisioned what was to come―I came. A ghosT,
Later in the sky, the moon rendered the stalkS
Dead like bones, an eerie light, but I would gO
Slowly, over furrows, row by row, as not to falL.
Will Willingham says
I think there might be, Rick. Seems like my happiest times as a kid were when I was just wandering free and didn’t really care where I was or where I needed to be.
Made me laugh, about the Children of the Corn. 🙂
Sandra Wirfel says
I used to love going on Artist Dates, from when I did the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I love the double reverse acrostic, I haven’t written an Acrostic poem since middle school when we had to do our names. I love the line “dead like bones”
Marcy Terwilliger says
LW,
I’m the Queen at getting, it’s not pretty but I do stop and ask people, “Where am I?” A GPS gift last year saved me. You shared some sweet moments as a child, so vivid as I see you sitting on that counter. Yet, lingering under the clothes coming out at the wrong direction. As children we all get distracted when something else catches our eye. Life marches on yet we linger, enjoying the view, we don’t hear the noise around us, Richard touched on it also, life on a farm. That’s all I ever knew, just wandering off, crossing fences, little skinny legs that took me to places no one knew about. I wasn’t lost but you couldn’t find me either. You gave me a smile today and memories of childhood, thank you.
Will Willingham says
GPS is a blessing and a curse for me. 🙂
Marcy Terwilliger says
L.W. I’m the Queen at getting “Lost”
Marcy Terwilliger says
“Lost”
From what or where?
Same house, the chair.
Life, unbound
Let me live
Until I’m found.
Hide behind the moon,
Come back
The month is June.
Sun shines warm
No more cold.
Do a happy dance
Barefoot slick in
Green grass
With head of hair all
Tossed back.
Birds of air flying high
I want those wings,
Let me try.
Sandra Wirfel says
I love the wy your poems brings summertime alive.
Michelle DeRusha says
I do not love getting lost. Nonetheless I am a bit lost myself these days – I’m thinking this book might be a good read for me. I haven’t read anything by Solnit before. Thanks for introducing me to her. I am intrigued.
Will Willingham says
For me, I don’t know if it was “love” so much as becoming acclimated to it. It’s become sort of a natural habitat for me. 😉
Solnit has an amazing voice. We did a book club last year over here on her “Faraway Nearby” which I loved even more than this book. You might enjoy:
https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/category/the-faraway-nearby-2/
Diana Trautwein says
Hmmm…the only way I learned to navigate Santa Barbara when I first moved here was to get in the car and DRIVE. And slowly, I figured out that all these winding streets always lead somewhere! When I was alone (my husband worked 125 miles south and commuted every week) it was a grand way to unwind after work. I kinda liked being a little bit lost. Not sure I’d like being a lot lost — and I never enjoy it when I’m facing a deadline of some sort. Lovely essay, LW – thank you.
Will Willingham says
And you’d think by now I’d have learned to build all that extra space into my schedule, knowing I’m going to get lost on the way to somewhere. But I still don’t. 🙂 I don’t like the feeling of being lost when I’m on a deadline either. 🙂
Cheryl Barron says
Where do you find this book?
Will Willingham says
Any bookstore is likely to have it, though here’s a link to it at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143037242/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0143037242&linkCode=as2&tag=tweetpoetr-20&linkId=WOSZWXINV5KJAJEU
Solnit is a fairly popular writer. Might find it in your library as well. 🙂
Donna says
I love this. And congratulations, by the way, on the thousands of miles traveled and not getting lost (even though the point you are making is that getting lost is okay, in fact, beneficial). Not getting lost carries its own rewards. 🙂
We have moved a lot in our married lives and getting lost turned out to be a gold mine for me in learning my way around. People would say “Do you know where such and such is?” and I’d find my self saying “YES! I was lost there once!”
And then there is another kind of lost… I think of my sons as they come into adulthood and wonder how, if I have done any good at all as a mom, they could be so absolutely and completely LOST? I keep telling myself, and my husband, “They have to find their own way” while we each wonder aloud “But how, if we raised them with such love and acceptance and creativity, can they be so filled with fear and or uncertainty?” This post brings me to that experience, which we are not completely finished with yet, and the notion that getting lost is necessary if one is to find where they really want to be. This: “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery”
It’s so hard for me to watch loved ones experience being lost and to resist the urge of dragging them out onto the path, any path, just so they won’t be lost… but so invigorating to see them gradually find their way out of the tangle, walking on their own two feet on their own paths. This is one part of parenthood that I was completely surprised by.
Will Willingham says
Yeah, watching someone else wander is hard, even when you know the process can be good. 🙂
Nessa says
I really like reading Solnit’s words, but in this post, it was weird, with suddenly someone else adding in a comment about a quote she used in her book. It was really like the GPS unit commenting on my reading of Solnit’s wonderful words! Ha, so you make me laugh!!