You are standing on a street corner and wondering how you got there. Nothing looks familiar and anxious energy starts to rise. You aren’t even sure when you got lost but you are quite aware at this moment that you are indeed lost. People start to look different. Directions all look the same. All previous problem solving skills cease to work and the brain shuts down. You don’t know what to do.
What do you do? You pick a direction and start walking. Further and further down the chosen road you begin to realize that you are even more lost. That choice seemed to be the wrong one. So you go back. When you arrive at what you thought was the corner in which you found yourself, everything looks different. It isn’t the same corner. Where is that corner? You at least knew that corner but now you don’t. You make another choice.
As you walk down the newly chosen street you begin to think and wonder about the nature of getting lost. Why does this happen? How did this happen? “I always pay close attention” you say to yourself. This doesn’t make sense. Reality itself becomes questioned. The dizziness of uncertainty begins to make you walk faster but the faster you walk the less you notice. You never fully acquire a sense of location of where you are. The search for what is known continues to deepen your lostness.
You eventually put your head in your hands and walk into a coffee shop. You sit down. You pull out a notebook to see if previous thoughts or descriptions of your surroundings will shed any light on where you are. But the writing is in code and makes no sense. You begin to weep. Sitting there, quietly to yourself tears fall in slow motion down each cheek. Being lost is like being mad – the distance from what is known, what feels real, is an emptiness like no other.
You stand up. You feel different. Energy is gone. You begin to walk. Your brain is mush. The system is shutting down. Everything that has worked for you no longer does. You are now completely and utterly lost. You wonder when things will begin to make sense again. There are no answers to those questions. You must now wait for clarity as you wonder. History and the lives of others tell you it will most likely come, that it is supposed to come in the middle of our darkest times, but it still isn’t here.
Patience now has a whole new meaning.