Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else ....
glad to be lost, learning how real it is here on earth, again and again.
From Cutting Loose, William Stafford
Welcome dear readers,
I read an article recently about how GPS use is making us stupid.
When we navigate without a GPS, we use both our hippocampus (spatial processing) and our prefrontal cortex (for strategy) to figure out our journey. Researchers expected those parts of the brain to still be working, albeit less so, when a GPS is used. But in fact, we simply stop thinking spatially and strategically while we follow the GPS’s instructions. We may be on the right path, but we’re lost from our own intelligence.
The article made me think of a conversation I had with a friend.
“I got lost in the woods yesterday,” said Leo, “no really.”
“Not too lost,” I said. “You’re here now.”
“But you know those stories where the missing person is found dead 35 feet from the trail? That’s how it was. I was taking a run when I decided I didn’t want to do another loop around the pond, so I started back, but found myself off the trail. The trail was there, but I couldn’t see it. But when I was on the trail, it seemed impossible not to know where it was.”
“How did you find your way back?”
“I had to climb up to the top of the tallest hill, look down, see the parking lot, and then plunge down again. Once I started down, the trees were all around me, so I couldn’t see, just had to keep going on blindly, hoping that I was going in the right direction.”
“Where were you?”
“That’s just it. I was in my home town, just in the forest in my home town. I knew where I was but still was lost. Or maybe I should say that I was lost but still knew where I was.”
I was lost but still knew where I was.
Dante opens his Inferno with the line -- In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, the straight road lost.
Dante finds himself in the moment of realizing he is lost. The unfamiliar, the dark woods, wake him up to his life. In his dislocation, he finds his center.
Or as Thoreau writes: Not until we are lost, do we begin to understand ourselves.
It’s the thing about being a vibrant, creative person, the path to our understanding keeps changing – we get a sighting and plunge ourselves into uncertainty; we run the risk of never finding another path again, of being 35 feet away and not knowing how to proceed back.
And yet we listen. We look. We find ourselves in the middle of the darkness. We find ourselves by getting lost. We sing from sorrow. And, for me, that truth is more radiant than following, without awareness, someone else’s directions.
Emily
* In the Italian – Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.