Why You’re Never Really Meant To Find Your Way

Maybe the point of life is to always be lost. Maybe we’re not supposed to have our shit together, to have it figured out, to find our way. Maybe there’s no ‘way’ to be found. Maybe life is an aimless upward swing toward infinity. Maybe there’s no direction, no right path, no fate, no destiny. Maybe we simply choose to be where we are and make that mean what it means to us in the moment.

Do you ever realize that you can experience the exact same moment with someone and both bring away from it a completely different memory? We’re all lost. There’s no home to be found. This ending point or finish line we’re looking for doesn’t exist. Our experience begins and ends right now. Our moments, this one, that one, the one that just passed, burn out like a flame.

We’re not meant to be found. Our lostness, our aimlessness, our wandering is what makes us human. It’s about the search. The search for purpose and meaning and love and lust and heartache and heartbreak and there is no right or wrong path, there is simply the path we are currently on.

I think when we’re young and fumbling through the painful act of growing up, we are in constant search of The Thing that will bring us to the feeling of being found. We grapple in the darkened landscape of our future for a footing, something sure and stable to hold onto. We have mistakenly been led to believe that if we follow some pre-ordained path that somehow we will find the “right” way to live. We collect achievements and successes and things and paper we call money and we think that this somehow all adds up to a live fully lived.

And then, soon enough, we become lost again. Or, we think we’re lost. But, we’ve always been lost. We are not all-knowing. There is a sense of mystery in just being alive. We are at the mercy of a universe that we can try to put into words to explain, but of which we can never fully understand or articulate. We are lost by nature. We are lost because we are never meant to be found. We are never meant to find our way. This entire life we have that is set forth in front of us is the adventure, it’s the grand scheme, it’s the whole of the journey. Yeah, it’s cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason. We are in the middle of a journey. We are in the great unknown. There is no sense in finding our coordinates. There is no sense in finding out where we are, what’s coming next, because we can predict and predict and predict, but, by nature of the universe we are a part of, we will only know the next step after we’ve taken the step before it. It is the divine symmetry of the universe we live in. The first step precludes the next step precludes the next step. It can only be this way. There is no other way.

So, when you feel lost, remember that feeling lost is feeling alive. You are perfectly meant to be lost. That, to be found, is to cease living. This is your journey and there’s no sense in fighting it. The journey will keep on keeping on whether you fight it or not. You can’t step off the train. You can’t ever find your way. The thing you can simply do is accept that you are lost, that you are fumbling within a great unknown. Because, when you think about it, we are human beings held down by gravity on top of a floating rock in the middle of a space so vast it cannot be measured. On a macro level, we are lost, floating, infinitely spinning in the darkness. In the whole of the physical universe, we don’t even know where we are, what else is out there, or what it all means. May as well lean into that abyss, that lostness, and let go of the need to find a way and instead realize you are already on the way, one step into the next step into the next.