The Lost Art of Getting Lost

Who knows where this will lead?

Edited to add - I performed a reading of this piece and you can see it here:

Reading - The Art of Getting Lost

Hello there,

During any journey in my company, you will, at some point, realise that I am just tagging along. It's what I do. I am one of nature's taggers. A useful travelling companion at times, but not someone who ought to be allowed to navigate.

Me on the beach at Dawlish

As I follow you around corners and across roads, I will be silently thinking, How on earth do you know where we’re going?

I rarely ask that question aloud though, because people inevitably start saying things like, Go left along Burntbum Road then over Doolally Bridge, pass Lollygag Way and take the third right turn after Blindman’s Cross. And I will have absolutely no idea what they mean by any of this. It may as well be in Swahili.

Give me a paper map and I can plot a route and follow it; I’m not entirely useless. I can use the map on my phone too. Most of the time.

I find the GPS has a tendency to play games with me, telling me, just for fun, that I’m heading in the opposite direction to my actual route. What laughs we have together, my phone and me. And I hardly ever lose my temper. The very thought.

Sometimes, in order to protect my mental wellbeing, my sense of calm and, more importantly, my sanity, I eschew the use of my phone. Unfortunately, without a visual aid of one sort of another, you can put me in any high street and let me wander into a shop (preferably one selling books or stationery), and when I emerge, I will have no idea how I got there and where I’m headed next.

At the start of a trip, assuming I’ve been to my destination before, I can picture the end goal, and I sometimes have a fair idea of where I am during the heady euphoria of setting out, but I cannot for the life of me connect the two. For me, a journey is a leap of faith, and it’s also a numbers game. If I keep moving and make enough turns, some of them will probably turn out to be the right ones.

sign with a map of Bolton Abbey

That doesn't always work out, of course, but I don't really have a fallback option, so I stick with it.

I’m not sure if my sense of direction is at fault. I can sometimes find a place by following my nose, even if I’m walking in the countryside without any major landmarks. It’s more a case of there being a glitch in my internal mapping device. It doesn't mesh with the physical geography of this world. Because of that sense of disconnection, it seems that places are allowed to move, and so they make full use of their freedom.

Car parks shift from one side of the road to the other. Restaurants silently glide to a different part of town. Cinemas sidle through back alleys and settle in quiet avenues. Shops hop over each other in a mad game of leapfrog. Museums gently fade from one part of the time-space continuum to another. Even large buildings such as office blocks can up sticks and relocate.

Okay, this might not be your reality, but it’s mine and I’m stuck with it. Some philosopher or quantum physicist (and really, who can tell the difference?) has probably said something clever about this. At least, their words probably sounded clever, but that may have been because no one had the faintest idea what they were on about.

Is my perceived universe the same as yours?

I asked Heisenberg, but he wasn't certain.

[Quick extra bit here because who has time for footnotes?

Formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.

Source: https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-explained/uncertainty-principle]

Still, I have somehow managed to bumble this far through life, and I wasn’t always late for everything. And if I was, it was probably more to do with all the procrastination I had to complete before I set off. I mean, you wouldn't want to leave your procrastination unfinished, would you? That would take it to a whole new, meta-procrastination level.

And there are upsides to my directionless wanderings. As Colonel Blashford Snell is supposed to have said, adventure is the result of poor planning, and while getting lost I have often made serendipitous discoveries. A dance festival in the street, a market, a jazz band, a carnival, a juggler wearing a fur leotard and riding an enormous unicycle. He was juggling flaming torches, so how his furry outfit remained unsinged I will never know.

There are small discoveries too. A wild flower growing through the cracks in a little-used pavement. A wonderful clearing in an unvisited part of a forest. A lovely old building I’ve never seen before.

Spotted this on our lawn

And then there’s this: when you don't really know where you’re going, it’s a small step to achieving the mental space you need in order to enjoy the journey.

And that’s one of the great joys of life, isn’t it? To enjoy the journey.

Thanks for coming with me on this small journey today. It was good, for a change, to have someone else tagging along with me.