(August 30, 2019 / by Jorge / Photo: Michael Hoffman)

 

I recently read a beautiful article in Aleph:Faena , <em>The Art of Getting Lost</em><a href=’https://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/on-the-art-of-getting-lost/#’> (1)</a>. It makes the case for both that, considered practically, getting lost is a decision (or at least an act of acceptance) and that the experience itself can nurture our freedom. But the act of willfully getting lost, as Walter Benjamin recommended, actually invokes one’s fate and makes the journey, not the arrival, the important thing. And that is what is at the core of all great and illuminating travel adventures: the will to arrive at unknown unexplored locations that must be then dilucidated.

The opportunity to be surprised, and in the process live your own script, living free of preconceptions and expectations, awakens the spontaneity and throws one’s mindfulness into overdrive. That capacity to be amazed that has to be defended at all cost, present when you move into a new house or a new town and that is slowly lost with time. You ‘see’ the living room, you ‘smell’ the cupboard, it’s all intriguing. Then, with time, your drive home does not register anymore. But, for a time, you were completely ‘there’ at the moment. It was the journey, not the arrival. And it was the new ‘eyes’ discovered, not the location.

And that is an intuitive knowledge so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is even codified in our language as we ‘get lost’ in a book, or we ‘get lost’ in our reveries, or ‘get lost’ in our craft. And in those instances, we ‘get lost’ while staying in place. Because, as Marcel Proust reminds us the change of scene will not be enough in itself, “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”

You don’t need to move to Paris…

There has been multiple times when life has thrown you an invitation to get lost (like the joke of God sending the castaway helicopters and safety rafts), but in your insistence in defending your sense of illusory certainty, your need to be ‘safe’, you have turned a deaf ear to the call and settle for a  life of expectations and denials. And Life tells you: “Ok, now jump, you can do it”.

Go ahead, jump, might as well jump