Getting Lost To Find Perspetive

Some days are Wide-Angles.The kind of day where all the things I see are out there on some grand horizon and I am just trying to take it all in. Other days are Macro-Focused, giving time and space to see the stitchings and cross-hatches in the fabric of my life. I need both.

I got lost again on a run. It’s a pretty common thing for me. I tend to run towards areas that I haven’t seen before, look around and ooh and ahh. Before long I not only don’t recognize the landscape, I am not sure how to get back to where I started.

And it’s not like I am going to stop, turn around, and go back the way I came.

Really? That’s just boring.

No. I will keep running, making turns here and there with the child-like part of me that trust I will eventually get home. It might be a bit longer than I expected. It might mean I get tired before I get there, that my legs might give up before I reach my destination. But I will at least enjoy the landscape that is new, and unexplored.

Today, when I noticed I was “lost” I began to chuckle and think how many other times this has happened in as many places. (I got lost running in the Dominican Republic and in Auckland, New Zealand all the time.) As I was laughing at my situation, I was thinking about the Wide-Angles and the Macros in my life. And as a timely soundtrack to this pondering, Moby’s “Extreme Ways,” came on:

”Extreme ways are back again, Extreme places I didn’t know…Extreme ways I know will part the colors of my sea, perfect colored me. Extreme ways they help me, they help me out late at night. Extreme places I had gone that never seen any light…”

Getting lost gives plenty of time to explore the extremes in one’s life – be it the big picture that comes in Wide or the little rooms inside a soul that need a Macro-focus to be opened into the light. Getting lost can be a good thing even if there is snow falling on the horizon and it’s moving towards me. Because not much in life is terminal… and even those moments might just be new beginnings that never would have been discovered if I never got lost once in awhile.