Feeling lost? Good, now the life you're meant to live can begin.

A meditation on living a life that belongs to you, and why it can only be found where the maps end

Photo by Isaac Davis on Unsplash

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Every December I get daily emails about reflecting on the year just past and, more importantly, how to design my New Year so I can optimally manifest the life I want. 

Usually, these well-meaning messages offer to show me a map of how to get what I want—all for a reasonable fee, of course.

There was a time when I looked forward to getting these emails and their promises of a roadmap to my Best Life. Back then, I was like a thirsty man in the desert, looking for help. I didn’t trust myself and there were other, apparently more successful people out there who had done what I could not and cracked life’s mysterious codes of how to be a fully optimized human.

So I took their advice and followed their maps, which got me unstuck and moving. But I quickly found myself, as many people do, lost. Unsure.

What happens when you’ve reached the edge of other people’s maps and you don’t find what you expected, or what you were promised would find?

What if, after many years of searching, you aren’t clear on what you want anymore? Or what if you’ve become disillusioned with wanting itself, and really just want to want something again—something true, something real?

Where the Map Ends

I think about these things often because, over the past couple years, I’ve found myself standing where the maps that others have given me end.

I’m not alone in this. I’ve had this conversation with several friends recently, all of whom are experiencing something similar in their own lives. All the achievements, goals, and manifestation have lost their shine, because they’re no longer driven by the ambitions that once fueled them to hustle, grind, and pursue.

As we approach the New Year, our conversations have orbited around new questions: What am I really here to do? How do I get past this feeling of not knowing what to do? 

I hear the subtle confusion in their words. They’ve designed, optimized, and manifested more things in life than most people ever will. They’ve come a long way and yet… they feel lost.

The sage Nisargadatta was once approached by a man in such a state. Rather than offering him a way out, easy answers, or a practice to gain clarity on his situation, he told the man:

By all means, feel lost! As long as you feel competent and confident, reality is beyond your reach. Unless you accept inner adventure as a way of life, discovery will not come to you.

By all means, feel lost! Lose yourself!

If you want what’s Real, give up what you so confidently think you know!

How many people have ever given you such advice? Few, if any, I’m sure because such advice doesn’t sell very well. I can imagine the man walked away with the same kind of confusion as the rich man who asked Jesus how to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. “It’s simple enough,” Jesus said, “Go and sell everything you have. Lose your whole life if you want to find it.”

To the mind it’s non-sense. To the soul, such an answer is more than an invitation; it’s a dare.

We all want answers… it’s human nature.

On some level, we all want someone to just give us the map or, better yet, a GPS that comes pre-loaded with the exact coordinates, waypoints, and efficient turn by turn directions that will lead us from Here to There along the path of least resistance. 

But, this is the path to nowhere, a domesticated life of another’s design.

I’m reminded of something a friend texted me recently after a gathering of our men’s circle:

I am currently reading Will Durant’s assessment of Ancient Greece, and a passage from my pre-dawn, insomniac reading this morning caused me to think of you and our call yesterday.  If you’ll indulge me:

“In his aging years, the philosopher Thales of Iona was granted the rare title of sage.  He was asked what the hardest—and easiest—tasks in life were. To the former he replied, ‘To know thy self;’ to the latter, ‘To give advice.’”

Yesterday the boys and I had the easy task: to formulate opinions based on our own experiences and perceived truths, and to offer you advice accordingly.  The real work lies within you: to know yourself and to base your decisions - of both personal and professional nature - upon the conclusions therein.

Trust yourself and the inner voice that guides you…  There are no right or wrong decisions here, simply an infinity of options, like [our artist friend] Dane when he stares at a blank canvas before setting upon the journey of creation. 

This is at the heart of what we’re all seeking from my perspective: to know and embrace the vast and sometimes unbearable responsibility of knowing and trusting our Self.

Advice is fine, but ultimately you must trust your Self and set out on your adventure… or not. This requires the willingness to embrace uncertainty.

Unless you accept inner adventure as a way of life, discovery will not come to you. The best you will ever do is shape your life in someone else’s image. Discovery, if you will dare to pursue it, will always carry you to the new, the unexpected. It will shape you.

The truth is, the life you think you want—the life mapped out by others—is rarely the one that will lead to your deepest sense of aliveness.

Ultimately, you must find your own way. Until you do, your life will not belong to you. You will be a stranger to yourself, which is a loss not only for you, but for the rest of us.

This requires courage and a willingness to navigate life intuitively, trusting the stars, currents, and your heart most of all. Rather than a map, you will have only a heading and, if you’re lucky, perhaps a guiding star. You will point toward the horizon and set off “that way” not knowing what you’ll find.

Living in such a way is scary. I know firsthand.

In 2020 my wife, daughter, and I decided to find our own way so we sold the life we had built in Franklin, Tennessee, and went on an adventure. We literally went West. 

At the time, most of our friends and family thought we were crazy. Some felt hurt by our decision, while others were angry or confused. A few said they wished they had the courage to do what we were doing, which made me feel like we knew what we were doing. (That feeling would soon evaporate.)

We sold our home, along with everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in the back of our car. What we couldn’t sell, we gave away—twenty-plus years of artifacts that were the proof we had existed once.

“Why do something so drastic?” more than one friend asked. 

In hindsight it was. We were not only leaving our home, our friends and family, we were also shifting our relationship to work, our sense of purpose, and what it meant to be us. Everything changed.

We were also doing it during a time when the world was ripping itself apart and death hung on the air in more ways than one. 

The past three years have been the most expansive, crushing, uncertain, challenging, wonderfully illuminating, uplifting, confusing, and joyfully alive years of our life. In our own ways, my wife, daughter, and I have each experienced the adventure of becoming and the return to being ourselves.

So, why do something so drastic?

The best answer I can give, even to this day, is that we had to. I can offer no rational answer. We needed a change. We knew it in the same way I think a caterpillar knows it’s time to wrap itself in a chrysalis, or how the hummingbirds know to head south. It was an inevitable choice.

I cannot speak for my wife and daughter, but what I most wanted was a life that felt true and alive. I wanted to truly know my Self.

I wanted the Real.

This, it turns out, is a choice that always comes at great cost. And you will never know the truth of it except in hindsight, often years later. It’s even possible you may never know the full truth of it.

We are only just now beginning to understand this for ourselves, and even what it means to be ourselves. That’s something no one can teach you. For this, you must be willing to go into absolute cooperation with Reality and be about the dangerous business of letting the old go so the New can come.

This, I’ve learned, isn’t always a gentle process. Again, Nisargadatta with his advice wrapped in a warning:

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it will destroy the world in which you live. But if your motive is love of truth and life, you need not be afraid.

This has certainly been true of my experience so far. Life can be trusted, and so can you. I wish I could offer you ten steps to your best life or a reliable map for getting what you think you want in the New Year, but I can’t.

As the end of the year draws near and you begin thinking about the vast open space that is Tomorrow, ask yourself what you really want and why you want it. Trust yourself to know the answer. If you don’t know, that’s also fine.

Go about the business of dreaming, making plans, and taking action—I’m not saying to stop doing that—but, as you do, remember that the truest paths are not paths at all. In a sense, they are pathless paths, which will always lead you away from the Known and, like a siren, call you to the Unknown. If your motive is discovering the truth, you can always go without fear.

Consider the idea that you don’t need to borrow anyone else’s map. You never did. You can find your own way, and indeed you must.