Maybe Being Lost Is The Only Way You’ll Ever Be Found

Sometimes on this life path, we lose our footing. We think we know where we’re headed and suddenly we lose our balance. Maybe it’s a breakup with someone we thought we’d spend forever with. Maybe it’s something big, like a devastating accident or losing a parent. Maybe it’s something small, like a twinge of fear when we realize the career we’re pursuing might not actually be what we want to spend our lives dong. Whatever it is, it shakes the ground we’re standing on, and suddenly we don’t feel right anymore. We feel lost.

And I think that ‘lost’ is a word we use to describe ourselves sometimes. We’re lost when we don’t have all the answers. We’re lost when we haven’t gotten a job after college. We’re lost when we haven’t found the one. We’re lost when we haven’t settled down.

We say we’re lost like it’s a bad thing, but the truth is, being lost is a temporary state. What’s lost can always be found. And truly, you’re never really lost, you’re just on the way to wherever you’re supposed to end up.

For some reason, we’ve been conditioned to fear change, to fear the unknown, to fear what we can’t grasp between our fingers and concretely understand. So then whenever we can’t perfectly label what’s going on in our lives, we feel lost. And we get anxious.

But being lost isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t like we’re going to forever stay in this state of confusion. When we’re feeling lost, it’s merely because something has happened in our lives that we didn’t necessarily expect, or didn’t really prepare for. It might be something bad, it might actually be something good in disguise, but regardless we’re hesitant.

But being lost really means we’re in transit—we’re undergoing these weird, foreign, frightening changes in our lives and we’re facing them head on. We’re moving from where we were to an eventual place of where we will soon be.

We’re not lost, we’re just moving. We’re heading into a new direction, we’re rediscovering who we are in the wake of tragedy or change. We’re becoming. We’re growing. We’re moving along this crazy life path and one day it won’t feel like we’re stumbling around.

One day things will fall into place.
And we’ll feel found.