A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For it is not, after all, really a question about whether you can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel.”

As the book title says, it is all about getting yourself lost. Lost in the woods, Lost in culture, Lost in space, Lost in mind. Solnit writes to capture the concept of loss, how it applies metaphorically and physically, and advocates for the deep power contained in getting lost. In doing so, she makes two key distinctions on loss: one of loss as a mode of being and the other of loss as an experience.

Loss As Being

“You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.”

Loss as being, the onto-epistemological state of existence where the surroundings know more than you know of it. A state where movement needs to be made with a skeptical caution but nevertheless demands movement, where the embodied experience is one of radical alertness and openness. Where you, as a person, come in contact with strange things, new things, and ephemeral outlines.

Solnit is writing here to highlight the latent powers of being lost through what I dub the Dialectics of Orientation. The act of making yourself disoriented within an environment, system, or process opens up futures, potentials, and new paths. In other words, to find yourself, you must lose yourself first.1 A journey towards knowledge necessarily starts at terra incognita

“The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself.”

But being lost is scary, isn’t it? The unknown has been a form of cultural horror found in The Twilight Zone to Black Mirror. There is a sense of unbearable ambiguity and foreshadowing of doom in being lost. Solnit, however, tells us not to be afraid. Information and knowledge are always out there in the environment to help you find your way.

“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.”

Explorers look at the stars, mathematicians look at previous axioms, and humanity has its stories. What she is trying to say is that we should all possess the necessary navigational tools or at least slowly develop them before going out into the deep unknown.2 But, without taking any risks at all, where does that leave you?

Loss as Thing

“The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle.”

Loss as a thing, the external object-focused state of existence. Something is lost if it is missing in the environment from the viewer. A phone, An opportunity, A body is missing—a piece of the supposed Gestalt whole breaks away into the void. Just as with being lost, Solnit writes on the merit of intentionally losing something.

Losing something is usually bad. Losing an identity, Losing a heirloom, and Losing a relative are all deep and effective forms of loss. The question Solnit wants us to grapple with is when those things have found their place, and you are dealing with the aftermaths. Does something else replace it? Did the loss take a piece of you? How will you transform in the wake of loss? 3

An example that resonates with me when thinking of loss as a Thing is Buddhist practices and philosophy. They view the world through impermanence (Anicca) and non-attachment (Aparigraha), with the ultimate end goal of freeing themselves from worldly attachments. A material or even symbolic loss can be seen as nearly impossible in the state of enlightenment. A specific practice is the creation and destruction of sand mandalas. It is a ritual of letting go and fundamentally a reformation of identity under Buddhist thought. A transcendence of loss, if you may.

I will end the blog by asking you to ponder some questions I have myself.

What things can you lose without losing you? What things can’t you lose without losing you? Are you lost?

Pre-read Predictions

The quotes are me matching what I said with what the author wrote or quoted. I’d say I was fairly accurate

I want to speculate about the contents of the book as I have been in that state of being lost many times myself. So, I know a thing or two. I also have really bad object permanence.

I think the author will speak on being lost as positive more than negative. Being lost is not always a bad thing and can be employed in fact very positively. Staying lost is a different story, though.

“And there’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”

Another point the author will write on is the epistemological nature of being lost; it necessitates a maximal amount of alertness, awareness, and openness in the space you are lost in. The radical openness allows you to learn/gain information during those times of being lost as you feel your way around the space and its objects.

“Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” - Thoreau

It touches on the important of experience and “unknown unknowns”. Some things really can’t be known a priori, and you have to allow yourself into the mode of being lost; if not, you will never grow.

“A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

In essence, it touches on not being afraid of the unknown. Being lost is just the potential for knowledge, so don’t fear it. At the start of the semester, we (students) are, in many ways, lost.

“Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.”


  1. The less extreme version of this can be rephrased as “going off the beaten path” or “taking the scenic route” ↩

  2. Like throwing a 2nd grader into PHD physics would leave them utterly lost and how slowly building them up is the more sane option ↩

  3. These questions seem very valued based on a worldview. A rich person might not care if they lost a $, but maybe would a friend? ↩