the wisdom of feeling lost

on being humble in the face of the unknown and unknowable

Who Knows?

Knowledge — what we can Know, who Knows, how, what kind of Knowledge matters, how it is recorded and legitimized — is deeply political. In the western imagination, it is not knowledge itself that is necessarily glorified — but a particular kind of it that seeks to make obvious and necessary things like hierarchy, war, power, and competition.

History teaches us tat the colonizer demeaned indigenous ways of Knowing, cosmologies, and cultural understandings in ways that are still deeply present today. It was “I, the white man, think therefore I am… and you, the native savage, do not think therefore you are not.” Knowing and a specific kind of Knowing became tied to personhood and Being itself.

This remains today with people assuming that Black and Brown people are less intelligent than white people unless we effectively perform what is associated with whiteness, with the same true when it comes to patriarchy/sexism, and many other forms of hierarchy. Highly subjective and manufactured (but framed as objective and natural) claims on “intelligence”become a tool that the powerful manipulate to justify their dominance over the subjugated (true of ablism, elitism/classism, anti-fatness, ageism, and many more).

Overall, the Western imagination has to overstate what is Knowable in order to justify its tyranny over our shared reality.

An invitation to the unknown: 

The audacity and the irony of all of this is that in an infinite universe, what is unknowable will always exceed what can be known. 

In an infinite universe, the unknown is fundamentally and inherently greater than the known. That we could claim to fully know or understand why we are here, what we are “meant” to be doing, and how our lives should unfold is a kind of hubris that cannot be separated from the colonial consciousness that shapes our understanding of reality and ourselves. A more humble approach to our predicament would be to acknowledge that we simply cannot have all the answers. To accept being lost as a deep kind of consciousness that connects us to how strange and absurd it is to be alive and conscious.

We do get some benefit from the process of trying to Know; trying to discover and learn and understand is a deeply human yearning and practice. The problem is how the certainty and arrogance with which this is done and how it is weaponized to uphold supremacy, colonialism, and hierarchy. There is, on the other hand, deep wisdom in uncertainty.

On feeling lost

Part of the reason we never feel invited to see the WISDOM of this deep state of consciousness is because our consciousness and understanding have been colonized to believe it is inherently a higher state of being to know exactly where we are going, who we are, why we are, and so forth. How many things have we claimed to truly “know” in our lives that we evolved to know differently or otherwise? Knowledge is more like an evolving and changing species than a fixed state of things. We can only know-now, and we can only know-some.

In the current paradigm, we must either BE confident, or fake it. There is no room for un-confidence in white supremacy, patriarchy, hierarchy — and I feel called to turn this on its head. What if there is more wisdom in a lack of confidence in a lack of Knowing than there is within Knowing itself? 

Let’s take a second and really think of how the universe works.

Think about the fact that I could die writing this or how strange and wonderful this planet we live on is. How much is so uncertain and how many things feel so absurd. How we can go from complete certainty to uncertainty within seconds. How five year plans never quite pan out.

Right now, I’m being kept alive by forces I don’t fully understand — or need to. I’m not fully sure how I came to be in this exact moment and this exact reality. I’m not fully sure — I cannot fully wrap language nor understanding around — what this reality even is or could be.

What this summarizes to is the idea that there is DEEP WISDOM in BEING LOST. In claiming this state as our own, and not as a detour away from something better. It’s a deep state of consciousness that brings us in deeper touch with the very nature of the universe — and of ourselves, as the universe experiencing itself.

Being lost is not an inferior state

That is what I wish to share with you today. 

It doesn’t make us problems needing to be solved or souls needing to be found. It’s actually core to our identities as complex and wonderful and strange — as members of and mirrors into the cosmos. 

So when we are feeling lost at sea, even the metaphor proves the point — we are emulating a deep truth of the ways of nature, the strangeness, the eeriness, the vastness of it all. The way all nature tends towards entropy, chaos, rebirth, renewal, growth, stagnation, an endless cycle. The way you can never fully say with certainty what’s about to happen next…

We don’t know which way to go because WE DON’T KNOW WHICH WAY TO GO. And that is in and of itself a kind of wisdom.

Sometimes we don’t know who we are, because it’s all kind of very completely strange that we can even contemplate such a thing to begin with, and that simple answers are expected.

The Beauty of being lost

I know: the experience itself is deeply uncomfortable, painful, despairing — and causes many people to even end their lives. 

So I am not glorifying the experience, especially in a World not designed to hold it. But what I am saying is that if we zoom out of the subjective experience of being Lost and look at it from a zoomed-out perspective, we see that it is when we are lost that we are seeking some of life’s deepest answers.

If we never felt lost, we’d never ask life’s deepest questions. And we’d never seek out the voices that might lead us to deeper truths. This can be dangerous: cults, abusive leaders, and scams can find us in this state. 

But so can wise spirit guides, sages, friends, communities, books, creators, poems, and poets — who have the exact words that our soul was seeking to hear. This is a beautiful experience, and it brings to mind the famous saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

To change the world, to usher in a new paradigm of Being rooted in love, liberation, community, pleasure, mutual care, and abundance for all — we need new answers.

And that means we need new questions. 

We quite literally NEED to be lost.

When we are lost, and we are willing to acknowledge it, we are at our most potent as a collective. What we are witnessing with the global mobilization of support for Palestinian lives — once inconceivable given the power of Zionist propaganda fueled by Israel and its allies — is an example of what happens when we are willing to acknowledge our collective bewilderment — and turn to DIFFERENT and more aligned voices for ANSWERS.

As global events, Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd offer similar lessons. Think of the false states of Knowing that were upended by those experiences, the false states of certainty, of direct relationship to hierarchy. What was once known by so many to be their truth and their reality became unacceptable — and in that void, new voices were able to pierce through.

When we are lost we are seeking the ones who can speak into the void with answers that resonate with who we’ve become in the process. With the deeper consciousness we have cultivated in the interim.

On death and rebirth

Here’s another way being Lost is beautiful. To the Western mind, death happens once, at the end of life. In many indigenous traditions and understandings, death is acknowledged as PART of life. Death and rebirth are cycles we move through all the time.

If we look at it through this lens, when we are lost, a version of us has died. We can no longer relate to our reality, lives, friends, jobs, or whatever it may be, the way we used to. That is a kind of death, without getting lost or attached to our associations to it.

Even if externally nothing has changed, internally, a whole new Being has taken shape. They cannot relate to their reality in the way they used to. As such, they are reborn — a new consciousness, a new relationship to reality is taking shape. This process of death and rebirth is what we then reduce to the state of being “lost” and seeking to be found. A beautiful process has taken place, yet we are not invited to see it as such.

And to the point of not glorifying the experience, we can turn to nature for many images of how painful the process of being born or being hatched into a new birth is. When we think of a being cracking open from an egg, or the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, or the baby screeching, there is an element of pain, of screaming, screeching, feeling a kind of suffering in the experience.

That is another way to look at what we are going through when we feel lost. We are cracking open into a new Being, and that process is always deeply uncomfortable. The world we used to exist in is no more, and we are cracking open into a new relationship with the World and with ourselves. There is much to mourn, but clearly as in all cycles of birth, there is also much to honor and celebrate.

It’s especially daunting when we are made to face these emotions alone. Certainly, as hunter-gatherers we felt lost all the time, but we held that feeling together, in community. As

Ayesha Khan, Ph.D.

says in her beautiful essay (they are all beautiful) on collective experiences of difficult emotions: we can hold almost any difficult emotion, so long as we hold it together in community. 

In a world of isolation and loneliness — of soulnliness, what I call the existential state of aloneness we feel even when physically surrounded by others — who are we to grieve our old selves with, and celebrate our rebirth with? Most people around us, we feel, simply “do not have the range”. More truthfully, we don’t have the emotional depth of connection around us to really hold these emotions together. We face the void all by ourselves, and the tears and despair and suffering becomes unbearable. Like a baby being born in an empty room — with no one to witness, caress, and hold them through their crossover into the next realm.

Since our rawest emotions are the same ones we’re socialized to grapple with alone, when we feel lost we find ourselves confronting the depths of solitude. There is much to mourn about this. There are far more connected possibilities for how we might sit with and even celebrate this experience in a different World.

Conclusion

By now you may feel the whisper of what lies beneath this conversation: that perhaps it is not being lost itself that is so awful, but our severe (mis)education around what it represents, and the loneliness we confront in the experience of it.

To all the people feeling lost, I hope you can hear further whispers of the cosmos beckoning for you to feel resonance with it. With all the mystery, the chaos, the magic, the unknowable in our midst. What else feels lost in the world? What else doesn’t fully understand its purpose, and seeks a level of certainty or Knowing that goes against the way of nature? As we contemplate cosmic consciousness — the idea that we live in a vastly conscious universe and we are not the only ones with consciousness here — we might find the lost among us are many.

I love you, and I will leave you here. I look forward to experiencing you below in the comments, to learn what has resonated with you, and what has been made clear or unclear in our collective journey to embrace the wisdom of not Knowing. 

with love and gratitude,
Ayanda 

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To dive deeper, sideways, diagonally, and upwards into this topic, listen to my most recent podcast episode:

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