it’s good to get lost
In the pre-Internet era, an unanswered question would have been met with pause for thought. Do I know the answer, we would have wondered?
Is it somewhere, logged away in the annals of my grey matter, awaiting recollection? If not, we’d take a different tack, asking ourselves: can I work it out? Whom can I ask, what can I read, where can I go, to find my answer? Today, our quests for answers are most likely met with instantaneous Google searches – and though it allows us to stop stressing over those pub quiz questions that would have lingered and driven us half-mad – it also disempowers us in other, more profound ways. You see, we’ve come to expect immediate answers.
It’s not enough that we can now place online orders before midnight which show up on the doorstep the very next day, but we’ve also become unaccustomed to waiting – for anything. When WiFi goes down, or we lose 3G, there’s a sense that we’re lost – without answers, direction, a safety net. Yet, once, that was just life – and we were good at it. Clearing out my study last month, I found my first London street Atlas: a pocket-sized book, marked out in yellow highlighter with all the places I had been. I was in my late teens and early 20s, finding my way around London without a phone. I would’ve left in the morning and returned in the late afternoon – without once checking an email, reading a text, Googling a question.
Much of our lives would have been lived uncertainly… yet, somehow, trusting all the more for it. It would not always have been easy: there would have been both agony and ecstasy in the waiting – like those handwritten love letters, posted across oceans – all the sweeter for their awaited, but unknown, time of arrival. The best things have always come to me when I have forced the least. When I have asked the fewest questions. When I have simply trusted their rightness and opened my arms to embrace them. Yet, for each of these sweet moments of serendipity, there have been myriad more, that have spiralled into shame and shadow. I have been guilty – very guilty – of letting my impatience get the better of me, and steaming into a situation that would have worked out so much better had I simply just let it alone.
The number of times it felt as though I was within touching distance of something quite magical, only to have it fall to pieces, just before I held it in my hands. It is only now, with the illuminating light of hindsight, that I can see – crystal clearly – that none of those things were meant for me. I do not know what the universe has in store for me, but that road map of mine, with its highlights and shortcuts, crossed paths and missed connections, has shown me that I am moving forward. I do not need to force, push, or even know where or when, I just need to trust that my steps are taking me in the right direction. Map or no map –walking home.
