Signals for what’s next – and what matters
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Hey Reader,
Joshua Tree, California –
I am lost and not sure what to do.
Strange, arid, foreign desert engulfs us.
My phone blinks “SOS.” The gps is gone.
I turn the car’s A/C to full blast to so I can’t hear myself think.
But my body doesn’t forget. An inky feeling in my stomach is creeping slowly to my neck.
I look back. My wife is unbothered on her phone, looking at old photos since no one has cell phone reception. My 2 year old boy is asleep in his car seat with toys scattered over him.
We ventured into the national park almost an hour ago. I was following our friends driving ahead of us in a caravan formation. After a small hike and photo op, they took off and we followed. I had a small but unavoidable sense they were misdirected.
But I ignored it.
And now my family is in jeopardy.
What’s left when it’s all gone?
Being lost and scared strips life of all superficialities. And rationalizations.
It’s the most honest, raw, direct confrontation you can have with yourself .
The desert is all that we cannot truly understand nor control in this world. How delicately tethered we all are to civilization, safety and comfort.
A ghost of a cellphone connection, one wrong turn, and you question everything. A tipping point as Malcolm Gladwell might say.
I wasn’t only searching for a destination but for an authentic direction. An identity. Many of us are.
Real disorientation is a gift precisely because its so terrifying. It is only then that the ultimate questions of life – who am I? Can I endure? Where am I going ? – become real and not merely mental phantasms.
Dostoevsky spoke of the redemption in facing such suffering. My story isn’t that dramatic. And yet…
Maybe going off the path is the only true guarantee in life.
Maybe the only opportunity to confront ourselves is when we are truly adrift and liminal.
Maybe there is no one else to save us. No angels. I certainly saw no archetypes of myself – mystic, healer, king, fool, architect, oracle – in the desert. Maybe we just try to move forward and save ourselves. Into the wild, out of the illusion.
Maybe that’s the price and privilege of consciousness – to get lost and become pro-found. Only people become unmoored. Not the black raven that dotted the sky in the corner of my windshield nor the sand covered cactus with tiny pink flowers that lined the road.
They have a connection to nature and themselves that most of us have lost.
Under the desert sun
The whole scene is a symbolic study of parallels and contrasts.
The immediate symbolism of the moment is obvious – the sense of being unmoored not only during the trip but also in life. Of nature versus man.
But it also represented familial and social bonds under pressure and strain. Of having not only failed myself – why didn’t I say something from the start? I knew that first turn seemed off to me – but also my family and my son in particular.
I also chose company over bravery. I drove close to my friends (lovely people) as they sped off in front of me. They were going so fast and so sure. I commented to my wife on how confident they seemed to be.
I could have turned back. But I was in too deep. We were going further into the park, my gas tank was depleting rapidly. Maybe it would take even longer to turn back and go the way I had originally planned. Who knows?
It is enormously difficult to heed your own inner knowing when everyone is going the opposite direction. Especially when I’ve been so wrong and so lost so often before.
Isn’t that what all the business books and “great man” hagiographies all say? That the mantle of leadership is to risk yourself and others – to be willing to be wrong and publicly so – in the aim of a greater future?
I outsourced my leadership.
Sure, I was right after the fact. After we had returned to the safety of our rental house.
But in the arena of the desert, I blinked.
Postscript
Too many times others laugh off what we feel deeply. That does not – and we cannot allow it to – invalidate the depth of what we see.
That’s the gift – and cost – of vision. Of meaning making. We feel things more than others. Others more move on. But we notice. We seek truth. We narrate.
I wan’t afraid of just missing a turn. It was about trust, control, my own place in the cosmos I suppose.
It’s also the burden of leadership. The constant anxiety of being responsible for the welfare of others. Of the raw fear of leading others astray.
That’s entrepreneur-ing. Doctoring. Human-ing. And most hallowed of all, parenting.
Did I over react? Maybe. Maybe not (given stories like this and this)?
Probably. I mean it was a 45 minute detour that turned out ok. We ended at the Coachella Valley (yes the place of the famed music festival) after all. I was eating a protein bar and pumping gas into my gray SUV while desperate to forget the whole experience. My wife fed snacks to my hungry son who had just woken up.
I am aware most stories don’t have neat resolutions like this. Too many people who are in their own deserts remain there for thousands of painful and inscrutable reasons.
And yet, here I am, days later writing about it, grappling on how to live the answers to the questions that remain.
Why do I so often feel alone in seeing what others miss?
but also
How do I become my own guide when all others are gone?
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
