#140: The Practice of Getting Lost
Dear friend,
When you’re out, do you tend to take the same route home?
Confusion
When I was in high school, I’d never know who I’d be chatting with at the bus-stop after school. Unlike other schoolmates who gravitated toward cliques, I was a free spirit with insatiable curiosity.
As such, I often found myself in riveting conversations with different schoolmates – as well as on a variety of buses with them, as we continued our long conversations.
And I didn’t always know the route home.
Connection
At the same time, I trusted that I would find my way home. It was only a matter of time and effort. My country is a small and well-connected one; there will always be another bus home.
Years later, when I traveled to much bigger countries for my university’s student exchange program and subsequently for a solo trip, I realized I had the same mindset: getting lost was almost inevitable. I could prepare to my heart’s content, but circumstances would invariably catch me off-guard.
The more I practiced, the more I discovered that my instincts were almost as important as maps in getting me to my destinations. But what if my intuition was wrong?
It didn’t matter. I could always retrace my steps, gather my bearings, re-center, and start again.
Clarity
Through it all, what I found poignant was this: I enjoyed getting lost. It’s not always fun to follow the same route home.
More importantly, traversing new roads again and again built my resilience like never before: I know I can always find my way home, come what may. Nothing and no one can tell me otherwise; I have the wits and staying power to navigate unfamiliar places and find solutions.
I just have to trust that teenage Yiling knew what she was doing when she started following random friends to different neighborhoods and finding her way home from there: she was training herself to be more flexible, more adventurous, more adept at problem-solving.
She was training herself for the wild twists and turns of life itself.
What about you? What’s a seemingly simple daily routine that you’ve been doing which could be tweaked to make yourself more accustomed to the different and unexpected?
And how could it help you get better at getting lost?
Always in your center,
Yiling
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