on life and lost

It’s a cliché to say that you learn the most – about yourself, and the world, and your place within that world – when you endure hardship. That you can only find your footing when you stumble. That to be found, you first need be lost.

I’ve always known this, but what I’d never considered is that the sticky parts – the feeling lost and the falling down – can be not only as valuable as that consequent, glowing redemption, but they can actually be more exciting.

I am currently in a place in which I should be feeling very lost and nervous. Just graduated with a BA in English (seriously: what do you do with a BA in English?), zealously sending out resumes into an indifferent void. Technically, I have very few “marketable” skills (anyone need a sestina writer?). I will likely not be making any real money in the foreseeable future. Every day, I wake up, and I truly wonder what I will do, who will reach out and find me in my little warren. (Don’t worry, Mom: a big chunk of that day involves job searching). I have no structure to my life right now. I cannot see next month, next week, even tomorrow. My future is up to me, I know that: but, honestly, it’s also really up to whomever decides to respond to my inquiry emails.

Last weekend, finishing up dinner and watching the suburban sun set warmly over the deck, my parents suggested (albeit extremely tenderly) that maybe I should feel more nervous about my current position?

That position, I’ll admit, feels really sketchy. Sometimes I feel like a moonwalker: even when I have a destination (the drugstore is a great field trip to ferry myself to. Buying cleaning supplies really makes me feel like I’m doing myself a favor), I do feel like I am, essentially, wandering. Like my feet aren’t quite touching solid ground; like the air moves right through me: without a job, without a place to go, I’m a little ghost-like to the forwardly-propelled worker bees rushing past me on Houston.

This feeling both is and isn’t as romantic as it sounds.

I scraped my chair back on the humid deck, pushed my grilled eggplant around on my plate, felt the adoring but also expectant eyes of my mom and dad and sister on me. “No,” I suddenly realized, and so responded. “I don’t think you have to be nervous to work hard.”

I knew, then, that I sounded a little naïve, a little quixotic, a lot like a recent English major grad lolling through her first post-grad summer. My family respects me too much, I think, to admit that to my face, which I appreciate.

But I’ve found a kindred spirit in Rebecca Solnit. In her brilliant book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” the writer explores the many iterations of losing and loss: losing things is strange, but getting lost in the world, or becoming lost to yourself, is truly uncanny. Solnit turns to an obvious example of getting lost when she asks a Search and Rescue team in the Rockies to recount their experiences finding wayward hikers and hunters. Here’s what she learned:

“The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don’t stop to read it. And there’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”

People get lost when they won’t admit they are lost. They get lost when they fight the circumstances of their ungrounding; when they try to fight the system, try to fight nature itself, try to assert their lordship over the woods and over what they do not know.

So here’s what I’m trying to do: Stop. Look and assess. Read the moss on the rocks. Accept what I don't know and can't see. Do the work that I can – because I am not lost in the woods, I am lost in my own life, and only I can clear the trees to make a path. But I can’t rush through the woods, frantically looking for a way out even if it’s the wrong way out. “‘Children,’” a Search and Rescue team member told Solnit, “are good at getting lost, because ‘the key in survival is knowing you’re lost.’”

Maybe I can take this time – a time in which I’ve never felt more like an adult – to remember what it’s like to be a child. To be in the weird moments, safe in the knowledge that these moments will pass. But also secure in this insecurity; to feel, always, at home with myself, even when I can’t remember what “home” is supposed to look like.