What To Do When You Feel Lost
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Recently, I dreamt that I was trying to catch a train, and the teller wouldn’t sell me a ticket. I grew increasingly frustrated as I heard the train conductor shout, “All aboard!” Later in the week, I dreamt I was at the airport, having switched tickets with a friend so she could have a getaway, but then I wasn’t able to find the gate for her initial flight. I went through bright white corridor after corridor, Severance-style. Last night, I dreamt I had arrived at an airport, my luggage was lost, and my laptop confiscated. Strangely, the airport personnel helping me track down my bags looked familiar—as though he may have also helped me in a similar lost luggage situation in another dream!
All were scenarios of sudden upheavals in my plans. All left me feeling lost.
As every writer knows, feeling lost and navigating the unknown is part of the creative process. An image often used to describe the process of writing fiction is driving in the dark with the headlights on, navigating just the next step forward.
Recently, I happened upon this free online college course on Dante. Perhaps one of Dante’s most quoted lines is:
In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta’s lectures are mesmerizing. I don’t know yet how the pilgrim gets out of that dark wood, but this trajectory from lost to found is common in both literature and life. Indeed, the professor points out the intentional “our” Dante uses, signaling that we too are on our life journeys and perhaps recognizing that all of us will also feel lost in life at some point.
HEAD TOWARDS WHAT MOVES YOU
In grad school during the pandemic, a professor mentioned over Zoom that if you are feeling lost, head towards what moves you. I quite liked this.
I was thinking about it when I read Long Litt Woon’s memoir, The Way through the Woods. The author is an immigrant from Malaysia to Norway who met her Norwegian husband when they were both 18. They seem to have enjoyed a happy married life up until his sudden death in his mid-50s.
That’s where the book begins. Long writes, “I was married, and then, suddenly, I was a widow. So far, my journey through the labyrinth of mourning had been one long, unbroken liminal phase. I was nowhere.” Later, she adds that though theoretically she knew that a positive transformation could still occur in her life, “it takes a lot just to stay upright in this alien lunar landscape.”
In deep grief and feeling lost, Long registers for the beginning mushroom foraging class that she and her husband had talked about taking together. Much of the book is about the author finding specific mushrooms. (Yay!) The descriptions are so visceral that I started to feel that the discovery of these creatures is what illuminated the author’s life during a dark time. In some of the places where she felt dulled and dead, frozen in her grief, the wonder she experienced reactivated her. For example, here she describes finding the Prince Mushroom for the first time:
“I scratched the stem of one of them and the smell of almonds flooded me. The hairs on my arm stood on end as it dawned on me what I might have discovered.”
At one point, she mentions that the composer John Cage was also a mushroom hunter:
“He compared the experience of finding a well-concealed mushroom to that of listening to beautiful, soft sounds, a quiet symphony, one that is often drowned out by the clamor of everyday life.”
FEEL FOUND THROUGH AWE WALKS
I first heard of awe walks (which by the way, sound like a cousin of Julia Cameron’s the artist date) during the pandemic. Awe walks are outdoor journeys that cultivate a sense of wonder. I think of awe walks as less searching for a particular something, and more creating the conditions by which you can be better found by the world. To me, awe walks are a way to allow yourself some space, perhaps even the kind of psychological spaciousness poet Naomi Shihab Nye talks about when she says, Your Life is a Poem.
One of the awe articles described a study where participants were divided into two groups and were required to take a few selfie photos during their walks. In one group, participants were told to add a 15-minute walk to their week, while the other group was told to add a 15-minute walk that would cultivate awe. Interestingly, the selfie photos of those who went on the awe walks showed the people pictured taking up less and less space as the study progressed. In other words, as they experienced more awe, they started to take the required photos differently. Rather than just close-ups of themselves, the photos became a way to showcase more of the nature around them. To me, this change suggests a kind of interconnectedness the subjects felt with nature that released them from having to be the center of attention.
This change in relation to ego is important for writers. Many pitfalls of the writing process are actually pitfalls of the ego. The more you personalize your perceived failures, the more stuck you will feel (and possibly be) in your writing projects.
I once took a time management-related class taught by Oliver Burkeman, who suggested that the activity you do after writing be one where ideas could easily fall into your mind.
This did not have to do with being in control of the creative process, but with allowing yourself to be found – in this case, by the ideas! Perhaps you can take a walk (an awe walk, perhaps?) after writing, or take a shower, or do as I have done and chop loads of vegetables. You will have done your meal prep for the week, collected and relaxed your mind, and might have teased out that knot in your novel’ s plot.
Whatever you decide, getting out of your own way seems to be a big part of it, getting into a mental space where your particular writing problems don’t loom as large.
How are you allowing yourself to be found in your writing life?
GET CURIOUS RATHER THAN JUDGY
In a previous post, I talked about how psychotherapist James Hollis encourages his clients to focus on meaning instead of happiness in life. He talks about how happiness can be very transient and how a frenetic search for it can lead to a life of distraction, of casual investment.
Long’s mushroom foraging, far from a casual investment, became a source of meaning for her. The course got her out into society at a time she would rather not be. Eventually, as her interest deepened, she realized she even had a goal, to learn the 15 species required to pass the Norwegian Mycological Association exam and become a certified mushroom inspector.
I can’t say for sure how Long Litt Woon felt about the mushrooms she discovered, if she always had a tenderness towards them, but her journey did remind me of a quote I have been mulling over for a long time. In A Heart as Wide as the World, meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg writes, “Loving awareness contains a strength that the judging mind can never give us.”
This type of awareness that is tender rather than harsh goes hand-in-hand with having a sense of inquiry. Long definitely had that–a lot of genuine curiosity as she walked in the woods–that ultimately seeped into a sense of inquiry (rather than doom!) about her new situation in life. Rather than remain lost, she was able to see herself, and in a sense, find herself, anew.