Getting Lost and Getting Found

We’ve all gotten lost. Most of us first have the experience as children. It may have been in the woods or a crowded department store. Wherever it occurs it is terrifying. Small children often find it so frightening they must deny it. They do not say they are lost but rather, “My mommy is lost.”

Being lost is less a place than a state of mind that frightens us no matter how old we are. As adults we get lost more often in our lives than in the woods. But there are many parallels between losing our way in wilderness and in life. It remains an enormously uncomfortable experience that threatens to overwhelm our equilibrium. We are motivated not to see that we’re off track. The more we have invested in a goal, the harder it is to change direction despite mountains of evidence that we’re on the wrong path.

As humans we have evolved to a time where getting lost in life is pretty easy. In the beginning, as primitive animals, we were guided by biological instinct. With the progression to hunter-gatherers (the way of life for the vast majority of human existence) there was a seamless transition from birth to death. Everyone was in the family business, so to speak. One’s social circle and work was defined. The goals were concrete and communal. Ambivalence and conflict about what one should do had yet to be invented. Success was clearly defined and usually attainable.

Paleolithic life may be experiencing a renaissance in dietary circles but is still perceived as a rather undesirable existence. We fancy our contemporary world of choices an obvious improvement. But what it means to be successful has gotten complicated. Whatever form it takes, many perceive it skeptically or overwhelming if not impossible. This does not make for greater happiness. I imagine the typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a better mood than your average modern human.

How happy or sad we are is another way of saying how found or lost we are. It is determined in large part by the distance between our present self and that self we think we should be, our ideal self. That gap can create an uncomfortable tension. We usually try to silence the discomfort by chasing quick fixes. Often we create a false self and conform to someone else’s model of living. We chase more of the things we know do not translate into happiness. As Viktor Frankl observed, we accumulate more and more to live by and less and less to live for. This makes us feel less alive and more vulnerable to the seductive trappings of other people’s agendas.

We run deeper into the woods. It is precisely because money or cars or shoes or food or sex is not quite what we want that we find ourselves thinking that perhaps more would be satisfying. When we have too much, it is because we have too little of what we need.

Emotions evolved as a signal to direct us toward or away from something. The tension created by the gap between who we are and who we feel we should be is an essential signal that can direct us toward one path and away from another. It is our inner compass. We will remain lost if that signal is anesthetized.

So how do we find our way out of the woods?

We all have inhabited our best self, no matter how fleetingly. We know it by how it makes us feel. There is no conflict, ambivalence, sense of time. We sense we are doing the right thing. The experience flows. Athletes call it being in the zone. It feels good.

We find ourselves by paying attention to when we are our best self. What are we doing? Who are we with? Where are we? Armed with these answers we have our compass. Life is lived one moment at a time. It is in that time frame that we make decisions about what we invest energy in, what we make the focus of our attention.

Directing our energy to inhabiting our best self has its challenges.

We tell ourselves stories to explain why we can’t be that person. We usually write this story at an early age when we did not have the tools to make changes. The story needs a rewrite. How do you understand the difference between what you have done and what you believe you ought to have done?

Many things are beyond our control. But we are free to choose what we will pay attention to, the meaning we will give to our life. If the goal is to improve the quality of our lives, happiness may be the wrong metric. Pleasure or happiness is simply the side effect of living our best self.