Finding Lost

Lost is the latest series to sweep my household; it began with the teens and is spreading, so that I am intrigued. The people in lost know they're lost because their plane crashed on an island. The point of the series, however, has more to do with how lost they were before they boarded the plane. It's symptomatic of life in the 21st century.

You only know you're lost, however, if you have some stable point of reference that sometimes tells you where you are in relation to where you want to be. If you don't know where you're going, the old saying comments, then one road is as likely as another to take you there. So when we say, as we say when we tune in to watch Lost on tv, that we are all lost, we are also imagining that we know what it is to be something other than lost.

How do you know when you are lost? You know because you have an expectation of knowing where you are in relation to where you want to be. The question is not: is it possible to find that stable reference point? The question is: where and when can you locate that stable reference point in your life? You only know you're lost if you know how to be clear about where you are in time and space. You only know how to be clear if you have experienced it.

You have experienced it. Take a moment, and notice all the ways that you are experiencing it now. Notice that you are often 'lost' because you crave better precision in your ability to locate where you are in terms of where you want to be. If you were really 'lost' you wouldn't know it.

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