How to Get Lost

Stop waiting for your dreams to happen to you and head out into the wilderness

Hello, Wanderers!

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How to Get Lost

The great paradox of our existence is that our human brains desire novelty and stasis at the same time. We want to experience new things, but we don’t want to get out of our blanket fort.

This is why many of us are drawn to get-rich-quick schemes and self-help quackery. We love the idea of getting what we want without sacrifice or work.

We are hypnotized by promises of growth without discomfort. But such promises are always empty.

The only way to experience the exultation of the hero’s triumph is to leave on a hero’s journey.

Instead, most of us sit around waiting. We wait to be discovered, to win the lottery, to find the perfect AI scheme for riches without effort, or we wait for someone else to show us the way to our dream life. Many of us don’t even have dreams of our own. We take our cues from celebrities and influencers, vacillating between the blank white walls of minimalism one moment and buying some new AI-powered gadget the next. We end up stuck, hoping for something in our lives to change.

Hope isn’t a strategy.

In his book, Oh the Places You’ll Go!, Dr. Suess called this stage of life “the waiting place.” He wrote:

The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a
Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for
Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

If you want to live your best life, you must go out and find it.

I don’t have a roadmap for you. I don’t believe anyone else does, either. Very few successful people understand why they are successful. They usually discount luck and are subject to survivor’s bias. Whatever they did worked for them, and they assume it will also work for everyone.

You are a unique being made of stardust. You must find your own way to the life you want — and that requires you to first get lost. You must stop waiting for things to happen to you, and you have to start making things happen for you.

You can learn from what others have done, but you will have to adapt their methods to fit your circumstances. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced the secret to a good life isn’t in the answers we find but in the questions we ask.

It’s the searching, the journey, that makes the life.

You won’t find whatever you’re looking for in the Waiting Place. You must leave your comfort zone first.

If you open your mind and are curious about the world and your place in it, you will discover untold wonders as you wander. You will find the ancient magic. You will find clues to your best life.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life from the time I was a sophomore in high school. I was going to be a lawyer. I had my life all planned out. I would get a bachelor’s degree in political science, attend law school, and then practice law.

Can you guess what happened?

I did exactly that — and I was miserable.

I cruised through my undergraduate courses. I had already done much of the required reading for my college courses while still in high school because politics, government, and political philosophy were my obsessions — I was a weird kid.

Law school wasn’t much of a challenge for me, either. I was an efficient student, only doing what was required. I worked as hard as I could to get my education completed as quickly as possible. I didn’t take any fun courses.

I passed the bar and opened up my law practice, and over nine years, it almost killed me. I quit the practice of law after having a severe nervous breakdown. I hated my life.

Looking back, there were many signs that I was on the wrong path. But I was too scared of not knowing what I should do with my life to question a flippant decision I made as a fifteen-year-old. I was frightened by uncertainty.

I spent most of the nine years of being a lawyer waiting for the right opportunity. I felt trapped.

Closing my law firm and losing everything I had worked towards for most of my life was the best thing that ever happened to me. It didn’t feel like it at the time, however. I became severely depressed.

But waking up one day and not having a career or any prospects allowed me to wander.

I was deeply lost. But it was only by allowing myself to get lost that I was able to find what made me feel alive.

There were a lot of false starts. Out of desperation, I became a copywriter — and that is when things got interesting.

My schedule as a copywriter was incredibly flexible. I had time to take long walks, to go camping, and to spend time with my children. Before, all I did was work.

I had time to do nothing, and in those periods of doing nothing, I noticed the world around me was beautiful.

I started to write poetry. Something I had never done before. I studied haiku and began using it as a mindfulness practice because my anxiety and ADHD made traditional meditation practices painful and unworkable.

The poetry wasn’t for anyone else. It was just for me, until one day, it wasn’t. I began to share it. I published a haiku collection and developed my own philosophy of English haiku.

I was still a professional copywriter. That is how I saw myself. I had my identity tied up with my work in that stereotypically unhealthy macho-American way.

Things may have stayed on that course had I not gotten incredibly sick and been hospitalized with a rare and painful intestinal infection that led to the discovery that I had kidney cancer.

I was fortunate. The infection had led to the extremely early detection of the cancer. I had surgery to remove the tumor and about one-third of my right kidney. Even though the cancer treatment was mild by typical cancer patient standards, it still rocked my world. I could no longer continue living like work and money were all that mattered.

Once again, I headed into the wilderness, this time both physically and spiritually.

I became an avid nature walker, hiker, and camper. My children and I slept out under the stars and watched meteor showers. I learned how to pay attention to the natural world. I taught myself illustration, something completely new for me.

Most importantly, I found that I had to stop looking to gurus for guidance. I was on my own path. Nobody could tell me the best practices or secret hacks for being me. I discovered that I needed to make my living from my way of living.

This epiphany led me to combine my raw illustration skills with my poetry. I started creating poetry comics every day. I also began working on transitioning from being a copywriter who only wrote for clients to being a writer who wrote for my audience.

It’s been twelve years since I first left the well-worn path of being a lawyer and wandered into the wilderness. I’m still in the wild, and I have no intention of ever coming back to the civilized world of office jobs and steady paychecks.

In many ways, I’m still lost. There’s not a guidebook for poet-cartoonists who write essays.

However, I’m more fulfilled than ever before. Life isn’t perfect. I still do some copywriting. Each month, I make a little more from my creative work and take on a little less client work.

Learning how to market and sell my work is hard, but it is also a joy. I was not put on this planet to be a lawyer. I forced myself to meet the expectations of others.

I was put on this planet to notice things about the natural world and the human soul and try and share those observations through poetry, comics, and prose.

I thought my dream was to be a big-time lawyer with a fancy car and designer suits.

It turns out my dream is to have the time to walk in the rain for hours and then come home and write and draw about the experience. I am one of the fortunate ones — I’m living my dream. It was only possible because I dared to get lost and stay lost.

Where are you at? Are you still waiting in your blanket fort for something to come along? Are you hoping life will get better?

If you truly want something to happen, if you want to find what will fulfill you, you must be brave enough to leave where you are and get lost until you find where you’re supposed to be.

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Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,