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.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Solnit writes to capture the concept of “loss”; how it applies psychologically and spatially. She makes two key distinctions on loss: loss as a “mode of being” and 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.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Being lost” is the state of existence where your surroundings know more about you than you know of it. A state where movement needs to be made with caution and urgency. The embodied experience is alert and open.
Solnit highlights the power of being lost. Being disoriented within an environment opens up new paths. In other words, to find yourself, you must lose yourself first. A journey towards knowledge starts at “terra incognita”.
“The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Being lost is scary, isn’t it? The unknown has been a form of cultural horror since forever. There is an unbearable ambiguity and foreshadowing of doom in being lost. Solnit urges us not to be afraid. Information and knowledge are always out there 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.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Explorers look at the stars, mathematicians look to axioms, and humanity has its stories. I interpret the quote as saying you should develop wayfinding tools before you place yourself in the unknown. Without taking any risks at all, it leaves a person unable to traverse life.
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.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Losing something is usually bad. Losing an identity, losing an heirloom, or losing a person are deep forms of loss. The question Solnit wants us to grapple with is how we deal with losing things. Does something else replace it? Did the loss take a piece of you? How will you transform in the wake of loss?
Buddhist practices and philosophy provide a way to understand loss. They view the world through “impermanence” and “non-attachment”. The ultimate end goal is freeing themselves from worldly attachments. To lose is to have had. A common practice is making “sand mandalas” and willingly destroying them afterward.