All my life I have been afraid of being lost. My head glancing to and fro as I search for the right path. A path that so many seek to find, and yet does not and has never existed. Growing up in a Christian school did little to silence the fear but emblazoned it. Being lost in the church meant hell. The thought of your soul tormented for all of eternity makes the idea of being lost more than just frightening, it makes life paralyzing. You sit and wonder about all the ways you may damn your soul, rather than living the life you have. Even at the ripe age of five, I sat pondering the everlasting repercussions of being lost. Many times I’d ask if I was going to heaven, because I needed that reassurance; I needed someone assuring me that I was not lost, never realizing that being lost is the one consistent place for all people. No matter where you are in life, we are always lost; always striving for something more that we can never truly reach.

We constantly say as a society that we need to be found; that we need to find who we are. There is no one to find, though. We are not Greek slate, our tales chilled in place for all eternity by the fates. We are an evanescent progress, an unfinished essay continually being rewritten until we simply pass with a scribbled last line. There is no state in life besides being lost, but for most of my life I could not handle this. I could take the physical, emotional, or spiritual sense of being lost. Even the mere thought of being lost sent me into a deep spiral of anxiety. My eyes squinting at the printed directions against the backdrop of a setting sun. Two hours I had driven, unable to find a way out of the labyrinth that the city of Poughkeepsie had felt like. We fear being lost when we should embrace it.

My view on being lost changed when I went incognito. On a class trip to Paris and London all I did was get lost. The very first museum we visited set the tone for my trip as I separated from the group. Wondering a grand atrium of black walls and black floors that led to sarcophagus as my class glanced at the clay, marble, and paintings of the Renaissance and Romantics. Later as our time abroad neared its end I hopped on the wrong metro train and zoomed off to the middle of nowhere. There standing on an above ground platform I wondered how I went from below ground to above, and yet it forced me to find my way back.

Getting lost is scary, and yet it is by being lost we begin to grow. Taking the wrong metro taught me that I can rely on myself rather than having to always trust and hope in others. The more willing we become with being lost the more independent we begin to become. It was not until I learned to survive lost did I really begin to grow. Where my friends beat against the same paths, new sights appeared before my eyes, I discovered new pathways and entered new buildings. All my life I have been afraid of getting lost, and yet it is when we get lost that we begin to see the potential we all hold. We are all lost, all fleeting towards paths that lead to the same place. Life is not meant to be repetitive, and yet if all we focus on is finding then we never move on to building. Learn to be okay with being lost, with not knowing everything, and you will begin to trust in yourself more and realize that it’s okay to go incognito. It is only when we are lost that we can find all the wonders that life holds.