Scribere Decisis

Being lost is a rather shitty state. There you are, yomping about until all of a sudden everything around you is unfamiliar, and you have no bloody clue how to reverse it back into familiarity. It’s a story we all have in our memory box to sound interesting at parties. You can be lost literally and figuratively; I have made acquaintance with many a person who natters on being lost all across the world. I personally had to hold my tongue before it would wag and tell them their personality is all I need to see to conclude they’re still very evidently lost. 

This is not a piece against the state of being lost. Quite the opposite. The importance of being lost comes from its nemesis – finding your way. Many people resign to the passivity of being lost. They enjoy the uncertainty and cloudiness of not knowing. It removes the responsibility and onus on them to find a way. ‘Lost’ is appealing because it is a state that happens to you. It is a state of circumstances that resigns you to a place you don’t want to be. But “to find” violently opposes being lost. It is active, for one, unlike its passive counterpart. The verb means to resign yourself, while knowing that the conditions are your responsibility only.  

Nobody really enjoys finding their way for that very reason. Doing so is a difficult thing to do. It is made worse with the temptation of products that promise to find the way for you. “Lets do the work for you, it’s all too complicated anyway”. Problem solving is angled to you as a hindrance, an enemy of contentment. They can keep you content by dealing with it for you. All you have to do is whip out your earnings and stick it into the Big Bank Transfer. It all seems so simple. If, of course, it were not for the fact that you pay the price by becoming a simpleton. Somehow in this day and age, some people are trying to sell you this promise of wayfinding in the form of AI. This is a terrible turn to take. So this story is a mimetic account of these two journeys: the importance of being lost in a world of AI and the liberation of finding your way back in your own time. 

This story is one a bit too compact to make all the points I want to make. Luckily, I am an ignoble and spiteful chimp on a typewriter. A weekly commitment to intellectually snarking works just fine for me and my chronically elevated cortisol levels. 

Feeling lost is a terrifying experience. At the centre of it all is the uncertainty of whether you could return to a stable ‘home’ or point of safety, amplified with the fact that you are meant to recognise the very thing that you live in, both in a physical or mental sense. And yet, being lost is the catalyst for us finding and learning everything in the world around us. You cannot familiarise something without it first being unfamiliar. (Just so I can be tautological,) everything is misunderstood before you can understand it. 

Finding is an active verb. Noticeably, finding your way does not mean you have found it; it is a process-focused rather than outcome focused word. It is a continuous process that describes almost perpetual stages of finding a journey back. This is part of the process of being lost; rather than find the original point, what often happens is that the points that you recognise accumulates into a pattern that ‘threads’ together all the findings into the route you originally made. This results in a journey or new route that becomes learned. Therefore, being lost and found are essentially like night and day. You cannot build a string of recognition out of things that you have always encountered before. ‘Finding’ is always secondary to discovery. The process of novelty always precedes finding. 

 Familiarising those spaces then creates the act of learning. The process of knowing comes with an unravelling of our situation. Namely, it unravels how we became lost and reconstructs it to become a state of being found. Now that this statement is on paper- bosh! Time to blow off the dust from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. Learning how we become lost, then, immortalises itself into wisdom of wayfinding. The Big man Aquinas himself states that wisdom (sapienta) is a game “for two reasons…because a game is enjoyable…a game is not ordered to something else but to itself”. It’s in fact rather wise of me to use the authority of this brainy boffin as a shield. His idea of wisdom parallels the same point I make on being lost as a process – wayfinding is a game, not an outcome. Problem solving is about the twists and turns we make on the way.

Wisdom then becomes the skeleton for why things, patterns, and habits have condensed while others have not. We find this out on our path – whether figurative or geographical – back to a place of familiarity. Aristotle says it himself that “sapenta est ordinare et non ordinari” – ‘wisdom is the habit of putting things in order’. Even when the analogy of being lost is removed, the concept of mapmaking, of ordering things that are displaced, is recognised as the process of growing a brain.

So if finding is an active verb, where it all focuses on the process, being lost is comfortable because we are obsessed with the outcome and not what we can do to contribute to our state. It is a place of learned helplessness, depending on our instinct instead of our skills. A wise person certainly cannot remain lost for that reason.