Go somewhere, and get lost!

How far have you strayed from the nest?

It is easy to stay close to the familiar.

But do you remember the first time you got lost? Maybe you were 7 and in a department store with your mother. Maybe you were 16 and a half, and driving your car in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Or maybe it was when you first stepped off a plane, by yourself, in a foreign city.

Do you remember how you felt?

The adrenalin starts to flow. Your sensors are heightened. Your eyes dilate, your heart pumps faster, your hearing picks up strange sounds, and your nose becomes sensitive to the smells it has long filtered, of cleaning products, dirt, warm plastic.

But there is something else stirring. Yes, there is fear, and foreboding. “I shouldn’t be here”. “It would be easier to turn around and stay close to what I know.” But even deeper than that — there is the more powerful feeling of ‘potential’. Where am I going to end up? Who might I meet? What might happen?

There is also a strange feeling of control — real control. For once, you are truly choosing your own adventure. You are reacting to the real environment surrounding you, more than to your biases and the creations of your subconscious.

If you want to make new friends — really new friends. If you want to see new things in vivid colour, and consciously choose what you hear and smell. If you want to create something that is all yours, and not a derivative of someone else’s. If you want to recapture that feeling when your mother first disappeared behind a rack of clothes in a store and the visual bond was first cut — then take the time and invest the energy to get lost. Get really lost. You never know what you may find.