The lost path.

This past weekend, First Born and I grabbed my dad for an early birthday picnic and what counts as a hike in Louisiana. I grew up backpacking the Montana wilderness with my dad. It’s the thing he loves most in the world, being under the trees and the sky and completely away from all the noise of our modern world. And I can’t blame him. There is a lot of noise. It’s inherent to being a responsible adult and it only gets worse the more digitally connected we are.

We spent the better part of a morning hiking all the loops for this particular nature area, saving the one that First Born loves best of all for last. But when we got there, it was closed for maintenance. I saw his face fall. A real bamboo forest in the middle of Louisiana is about as close to magic as you can get for a ten-year-old boy obsessed with Asia. But it looked clear. All the other trails were clear. How much damage could Hurricane Ida have done?

Turns out, quite a lot.

The path was mostly clear and navigable until we went to take the 0.3-mile trail back to the car. The way was blocked. Cue Gandalf shouting “you shall not pass!!!!”

Not one, not two, but five one-hundred-year-old trees had fallen over the trail, and just as we’d make our way around one, another was in the way. After realizing the fifth was too much for us to get around, we discovered we’d lost our way and had no idea where the trail was or how to get back to it.

It’s terrifying to lose your way in the wilderness and realize you have no idea which way to fucking go.

Go forward, where the path is blocked?

Go back, where the path is lost?

The answer is neither. You sit down and drink some water. Rest until that initial fight or flight response has passed. You calm your mind. Take a good hard look at where you went wrong and try to figure out how to untangle yourself. Where’s the nearest body of water? That might take you home. Where’s the nearest downhill slope? That might take you home. Where’s the nearest road? That for sure will take you home.

When you’re scared and lost and afraid in the brambles or cliffs or bayou, it’s easy to give up. It’s easy to feel destitute and alone. It’s easy to feel like a frightened child all alone in the world even if you’ve had some experience with getting lost and finding your way before. The initial response is always the same: Fuck. What do I do now?? The trick is to hit the pause button before the self-recriminations come and to flip your mental attitude switch from “I’m fucked” to “Adventure, ho!” as soon as you possibly can.

So, there we three were. My dad, leading the charge, clear-eyed, experienced, nonchalant almost. Between you and me, getting lost in a nature conservatory in Louisiana with cell phones and food and lots of water is more of an embarrassing proposition than a frightening one; so, neither of us was all that concerned and thought the whole thing was ridiculous and kind of fun. But First Born was genuinely afraid, so I pushed him from behind. “Keep following Papa, Papa will find the way.” While the path was uncertain, the outcome was foregone. We’d find the road, or bushwhack back to the Amite river via Google Maps, or, at the very worst, we might have to swallow our pride and call 911 after traipsing down a path that was clearly marked “closed for maintenance.” In any case, the only real dangers were a few scratches and mosquito bites.

But the fear First Born felt was real and normal. We all get scared when we’re forging a new path after losing the one that was so clearly marked. We see the person in front of us. The person who we could be, and they seem to be so far in the distance that we have to focus all our energy on them to keep from losing sight of them. Meanwhile, the person we used to be is following behind, telling us to keep going because there is no going back. But that poor soul stuck in the middle is genuinely afraid and uncertain and full of self-loathing for getting lost in the first place and can only feel the brambles lashing at their legs and the discomfort of creating a new path through a dense forest.

In the days since, I’ve realized that somewhere in the last six months or so, I lost my way. I held myself together and battled my way through, but I’ve been terrified and lost for months. And the reason I lost my way is something new and dangerously frightening: I had everything I always wanted.

To have it all at the same time. A fucking treasure trove of abundance. What do you do with that??? I’ll tell you what you do, you get anxious as fuck thinking you’re going to lose it. You become terrified because it’s important to you and what will you do if it gets taken away???

And you feel like an asshole for being afraid of something so fine and rare and wondrous. You found a fucking unicorn. Who’s afraid of finding a unicorn? So, you bury your fear in shame and hide it the best way you know how.

All of us have our own ways we avoid pain and fear. Maybe you retreat into bad habits, drinking too much and exercising too little.  Maybe you isolate, cleaning too much, and consciously sabotaging your relationships, trying to push the person closest to you away. Whatever is your preferred method of avoiding pain, one thing is for sure, you start to generally feel like a glorious failure even while you objectively crush every life goal because that’s how anxiety works.

The problem is that when you actively work to avoid your fear, you avoid the good things too. You can’t avoid one emotion and still feel the others. You can’t feel accomplishment. You can’t feel contentment, You can’t feel love. You lose the ability to feel anything positive to avoid that one negative emotion. If you’re like me, you deny that any of it is happening and choose the “fake it until you make it” method, being there while not being there at all. Holding yourself together until you’re alone and can fall apart and drop your basket where no one can see you. But that takes a self-sacrifice of will that, honestly, isn’t always the healthiest option. So maybe you do something else. You stick it out. You feel all the fear and anxiety and pressure until you just can’t anymore. So you avoid looking at it. But the harder you try to avoid that big scary splinter of fear or pain, the more numb you become until you wake up one day, feeling dead inside, and ready to catapult that treasure trove of abundance right into the atmosphere just so you don’t have to be afraid of relying on its presence anymore. 

Unfortunately for me, while I was simultaneously being there while not being there, I didn’t notice I was being loaded into a catapult to be jettisoned into an outer galaxy to nowhere. After someone catapults you into deep space, you have a lot of time to think, out there, cold and adrift in the nothing, and you finally realize that you allowed yourself to be catapulted. How? By not voicing clearly what you wanted, or voicing your concerns, or listening to your intuition and facing your suspicions. In other words, you let them do it by avoiding your fear instead of facing it head-on. By pretending everything was ok when every nerve ending screamed at you, trying to tell you something was wrong. Granted, that old catapult may have been dusted off and put to use earlier, but if it had, maybe you wouldn’t have been shot so far out into the unknown. Besides, if someone is just going to catapult you out into space if you get too close, wouldn’t you rather know that up front?

With time and distance and solitude, you start to feel gravity holding you in place again until one day you find you’re back on solid ground. Unfortunately for you, you’re now wandering in a dense forest on an alien planet that you never wanted to visit in the first place. And that’s where I find myself these days, smack dab in the middle of the unknown, sitting on this dump of an alien world and I pretty much hate it. It’s not as beautiful a landscape as I’m used to seeing and I really don’t have a clear idea of which direction to go. Going back seems treacherous and so full of betrayal that I don’t know if I can trust it, and, having been catapulted out into the deep and all, I’m pretty sure I’m not welcome there anymore anyway. But going forward seems terrifying and lonely and I really loved that home that I used to have, even as much as it scared the fuck out of me when I recognized how perfect it was. And, despite its treachery and gravity-defying flings into the nether, I miss it. Every day.

So, what now? Now I rest. Now I take a few sips of water and eat a little snack and figure out which direction leads to safety. Now I wander and find a path back towards home, even if it’s not the home I pictured when I lost my way in the first place.