Maplessness

"Lost a Planet, Obi-Wan has. How embarrassing."
-Yoda

Driving to Davis the other day, I met a detour on I-5 (due to construction). In order to get back on the freeway, I was forced through downtown Sacramento. Never having been that deep into the city, I was faced with one-way streets and confusing orange arrows. Eventually, of course, I found my way, but not without a few wrong turns.

See? It's a perfect metaphor for life! Cha-ching!

Alas, tidy parallels to our constant human waverings are really not my intention here.

My big epiphaphatic (not a word, is it?) moment came after I was back in the Bay Area (where I am staying for the summer) from my all-too-brief stop in Davis. I was telling my parents about my detour and my dad says, "I'm glad you made it ok. You don't really have enough experience being lost."

Apparently, my brain is some kind of quasi-waterproof fabric, like Lycra. It is resilient when it comes to water and sweat, but eventually, the liquid seeps. It's just the nature of the material.

So it took me a long while to realize the weight of my father's words, and how very true they are. I do not have enough experience being lost. He is right; I have only been lost for eighteen odd years. Nothing to his...well, I'll spare him his decades, but in my years, I have always been attempting to swat away the penumbra. I do have experience in that--in trying to dissipate fog thicker than Miss Teen South Carolina. It stubbornly persists, falling right back in to place, even after great disturbances.

I suppose that age brings with it a certain ease to navigating through the mostly uncertain fog. It offers the ability to trust in our own hearts and brains to lead us. Life lived breeds more confusion, but also more acceptance of the natural flow of all things. Heraclitus wrote that "a man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man."

We can always search for the waters we once waded in, or even drowned in, but there is a continual ebb and flow, a very real and veritable cadence to our days and to our lives.

To be lost is a blessing in its own curious way. In being lost, we grope around for something to tame grief: an answer, a destination, the calming of a roiling soul. When we are lost, we are inevitably learning--evolving towards an eventual goal.

I am young; I do not have decades of experience in finding my way.

But I do know something. We can lose a planet or another person, perhaps we can lose sight of ourselves. But as far as we breathe and our bodies produce work and thought, there is a constant, decided possibility.

Obi-Wan eventually finds his "lost" planet, Kamino. I eventually found my way back home. We only touch briefly upon our destinations before plunging right back into the atmosphere, all too often without cartography to an answer.