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I get lost everywhere. So, if it's a boon to be lost, I might be a genius.
I’m obsessed with doors. One of many beautiful doors, surrounded by tiles and patterns, in Fez.
I get lost in my home town, on familiar routes, sometimes even with GPS. I couldn't even begin to find north, south, east, or west. I'm often unsure of which way to turn on exiting a building. I cannot read a map, can't translate the two dimensional into three. I can't picture where I am in relation to the wider space. If someone gives me step-by-step directions, including landmarks, I can’t follow them. It’s pretty hopeless.
Is GPS the cure?
Not necessarily. It has changed my life, but there are some places where it just goes haywire, such as on Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago. It doesn’t always alert me about turns in enough time. And sometimes I go left even when it says right. But I don't get upset when I'm lost. I try to enjoy the ride. And get help.
Fez: an ancient marketplace
Even the most directionally-gifted, however, would have a hard time navigating Fez, Morocco, where my cousin and I recently spent a week.
A must: Moroccan mint tea, which is green tea with fresh mint. It’s served piping hot even on blazing hot days but it’s still refreshing.
This ancient, car-free market town, or Medina, is a warren of shops and narrow alleys and dead ends and beautiful fountains and shops selling mountains of carpets, leather goods, copper, textiles, vegetables, and so much more. Behind ornate wooden doors wait dreamy open courtyards, tiled and carved, topped by terraces that overlook the city. There’s a place to grab some Moroccan mint tea and a few little snacks just about everywhere.
Goods make it in only by donkey or hand cart, and you have to scoot out of the way when they pass or get clocked by an animal carrying its weight in liter bottles of water or risk spilling a vendor's cart full of plump green figs.
It was only several days into our trip that we discovered Google Maps works pretty well in Fez. But until then, we relied on, what, landmarks? My cousin's excellent sense of direction? I don't know. Even she got turned around. It's a miracle we made it anywhere.
What happens in your brain when you get lost
When we were lost, something was happening in our brains that may have generated some helpful juices.
Being lost, then, is a kind of creative exercise, a memory-collecting spree.
As Will Hunt writes in the Atlantic, in Getting Lost Makes the Brain Go Haywire,
"Lostness has always been an enigmatic and many-sided state, always filled with unexpected potencies. Across history, all varieties of artists, philosophers, and scientists have celebrated disorientation as an engine of discovery and creativity, both in the sense of straying from a physical path, and in swerving away from the familiar, turning in to the unknown.
"In a state of disorientation, the neurons in our hippocampus are frantically sponging up every sound, smell, and sight in our environment, scrambling for any strand of data that will help us regain our bearings. Even as we feel anxious, our imagination becomes prodigiously active, conjuring ornate images from our environment."
Being lost, then, is a kind of creative exercise, a memory-collecting spree.
A typical Medina Derb, or alley
How we navigate
To navigate, your brain is using two types of memory, according to Susan Kuchinskas' piece in WebMD, Why do you always get lost (this was probably written for me):
"The hippocampus, a structure in the brain that is also important for other types of memory, contains special neurons called grid cells and place cells that seem to create a cellular map of the places you've been and the routes you've taken.
"Your brain can find your way using either or both of these aspects of spatial memory...However, although we all rely on both kinds of memory, individuals' brains may tend to use one over the other.
Some people, she writes, use landmarks, or "object memory." Others rely more on spatial memory, conjuring the cardinal directions and distances.
The Medina is ruled by an army of feral cats.
Fear of being lost
While being lost might cause our imaginations to become "prodigiously active," it's true that getting lost can spook people and cause them to make some pretty bad decisions. Think getting lost in the remote woods, or a car breaking down on the side of the road in a snow storm.
In Wired magazine, Michael Bond's Why Humans Totally Freak Out When They Get Lost explains it this way:
"It is hard to predict how someone who is lost will behave, though it’s safe to assume—as search and rescue leaders always do—that they won’t do much to help themselves. Few people manage to do what is often the most sensible thing and stay put. Most feel compelled to keep moving, and so throw themselves into the unknown in the hope that an escape route will appear.
"Lost is a cognitive state. Your internal map has become detached from the external world, and nothing in your spatial memory matches what you see. But at its core, it is an emotional state. It delivers a psychic double whammy: Not only are you stricken with fear, you also lose your ability to reason.
So we have these two, seemingly contradictory states, if both can be true at the same time: an imagination revving up, and a psyche choked by fear. I would love to talk to a neuroscientist about the impacts on the brain. Could anything positive—new neural pathways?—come out of such an experience? Or is the stress too damaging? Context (duration, etc.), I suppose, must matter.
But imagine you're not in terrible danger, and you have plenty of time. You're just lost. Very lost. The only issue: making it back to your hotel before it's so dark you can't see your way down the Medina's unlit alleys. Can you let yourself go with the flow?
Leaving Google Maps behind
A few days before leaving Fez, my cousin and I decided to put away the Google Maps and just wander, relishing the adventure of it. We were confident we'd find something or someone to help us if we needed to. We could even have called the hotel and asked for rescue (they regularly send staff out to fetch lost guests in the Medina). Perhaps those facts make this less dramatic than being lost in the woods in a snowstorm with no hope of rescue. And yet I noticed an easing in myself, setting out to get lost.
In my day job, in my family life, I'm constantly plotting and scheduling, mapping out the days and trajectories of who needs to be where doing what. Schedule that meeting. Arrange that summer camp pick up. Get to the store before 6. Write that diplomatic email.
In Fez, none of that mattered. Dead end? No problem, we just retraced our steps and tried another way. Around this corner? Look! That leather bag shop. Let's pop in. Do you hear that clanking? Is that the copper pan maker we saw earlier? Let's follow it. We discovered the edges of the Medina where the locals do business. We stepped over the slick tentacles of octopus and fish guts gone splat in the gutters in the fish market. Feral cats darted from shadow to shop. Necklaces clustered like colorful grapes on the walls of a shop so packed we could barely pick our way through.
Letting go of the reins
To let go made me feel alive, uncertain of what lay around each turn, down each alley. Uncertainty shook my brain out of planning and survival mode.
Being lost is being out of control. But being out of control, I think, gives us a chance to repair the rough edges we create by constantly yoking ourselves back to the task at hand.
Just in case, (if ever!), you’ve got my number! ❤️😁
I love this piece! It's so interesting! I can see how getting lost animates our creativity and makes us relax into the moment. Bravo. A