How To Find Your Way When You Feel Lost

We don’t choose where, when, and to who we are born. But it does determine the distance that we will have to travel to become who we can.

All life, as we know it exists with its opposite. For there to be light there must be darkness, or if there is birth, death is also certain. They go together. Just like being lost goes together with finding something.

If you find yourself lost for a reason, one thing is certain, you will find the answer. It is intrinsic to the problem. Yet it causes a lot of suffering and anxiety to wait for the solution.

What are some of the things one can do to find their path?

1. Don’t wait. Act.

Get busy with living life. It’s such an impermanent state anyway. There is no joy in waiting. Waiting is different from patience though. Life will not give you what you miss or want immediately and therefore it is critical to be patient, but it’s not the same as inaction and procrastination. Don’t wait for the inspiration to strike. Or the call to come. Or the ideal time to catch that plane/train. Move towards the direction of your dream. Book that ticket to the city you want to live in. Send flowers to the girl you want to take out. There is an energy in this universe (The Higgs field) that likes repeated interactions in the area that you seek to forge into reality. The more the attempts, the higher the chance and speed of it manifesting.

2. Have a fuzzy vision and a lot of appetite for rejection.

You don’t need clarity when you are lost. You need drive. You need the courage to get up and dig/ act in the direction of your desire and keep your eyes open for opportunities as you move. Let’s take an example. You want to be a writer/self-employed entrepreneur/start something of your own. You are just starting. The vision here is to become financially independent. That is a worthy goal from where you might be right now. You have a few ideas of what you need to realize your goals. Now act in that direction. Make that cold call, write that blog, send in that pitch. Without the fear of rejection. Rejection is just you running an experiment with the universe. It’s not personal.

I really like what John Paul Dejoria says about what the vision of an entrepreneur should be:

“Get in the reorder business. Don’t be scared of rejection- Be prepared to be rejected. Believe in the product or service you are selling and keep going.”

You want to be in the reorder business. For that, you need a lot of testing and proving to do with your buyers. Train your mind for that.

3. Spend time watching your mind.

Look inside your mind and watch its movements. Don’t judge the images, emotions, and thoughts that arise. Detachment from your thoughts is the goal. Meditate with Sam Harris. He is the master of teaching us this. Join his Waking Up app. Our attachment to our thoughts is why we feel so lost so often. Learn to see the difference between who you are and your thoughts. Your thoughts are not you. They are your thoughts but you are not identical to them. This practice will slowly but surely help you see that your ego is an illusion that makes you get lost in thought and get identified with the emotions that emanate due to the thoughts.

We do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourselves.”
― L.M. Browning, Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations

4. Realise that we are constantly being led by one of our two selves.

We spend a lot of our lives being lost in our two selves. Our minds always toggle between the experience mind and the remembering mind. The Daniel Kahneman Ted talk explains it well. There are two selves that we always are at any given moment.

We are always comparing between being happy in our lives and about our lives. A lot of confusion arises from this difference.

The experiencing self who lives in the present. The self that lives in the present and knows the experience of being in the moment. Being here and feeling the air in your nostrils. Then there is the remembering self. The self that keeps the score of our life. Did we win or lose? Did we make it or lose it…It tells us a story. What we remember from our experiences is the story and that becomes our remembering self. The remembering self is the one that decides on which direction to take. The experiencing self has no say in the matter. We don’t think of our future as anticipated experiences, we think of our future as anticipated memories.

Daniel Kahneman calls it the `tyranny of the remembering self.’

Therefore how happily we live our life is very different from how satisfied we feel with our life. But the choice that we have is that if we can change the story, we can change the memory. So you can change the memory of your life by reframing the circumstances of your life. You can choose Gratitude over Grudge as the metric of your life. Stoics have said a lot about this. I highly recommend you read the book, A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine and choose Tranquility as a philosophy of life.

Importantly, have a philosophy of life. All philosophies of life, as this book explains have two components. They tell us what things in life are and not worth pursuing and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having. This will reframe what really should matter in life. And what is just shiny noise.

5. Become spiritual.

Being a spiritual person is synonymous with being a person whose highest priority is to be loving to yourself and others. A spiritual person cares about people, animals and the planet. A spiritual person knows that we are all One, and consciously attempts to honor this Oneness. A spiritual person is a kind person. Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

This is not who I was when I was seemingly successful in the external world. I was filled with self-loathing that I hid behind a ruthless cold heart. Somehow being spiritual is not seen as important or relevant in this restless, raging world we live in. But I think it can be a life-saving quality for yourself and those you love.

I really like how one of my favourite authors captures the choice that we all have of becoming spiritual and the route to get there being generously plentiful.

“Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in the sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Coda:

I wish you my warmest hug as you continue on your path. Feeling lost is a natural part of finding your path. It’s perfectly natural and normal to feel anxious. I hope some of my tools help you to move along and give you a little shot of courage and confidence.

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Previously Published on medium

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