We are mapmakers of our lives, creatures of the map as well, every event, every milestone of our births to our deaths is planned and written in a straight line with a false sense of comfort. We plan five-years ahead, we program our days in fifteen-minute intervals, we listen to the smooth and powerful voice of the GPS that can guide us to the most efficient pathway, the most expedient way to travel the known of our origin to the known of our destination. Here is perfect security, the feeling that we can control the enormous, tumultuous wilderness of reality and fit it into a grid of our own devices. We trust the schedule, the holy book of neat organization of a properly run life in which each destination is counted, each passage predetermined and ticked on a list. We want to eradicate the variable so that we could knock out the unknown, get to where we are precisely on time, as smooth, and as the same, as possible, as we have conquered and proved ourselves to be the masters of our own journey.
This is a gilded prison and this is an efficiency that steals wonder. We are all so caught up in pursuing the goal that we forget that the road to the goal is the reward and the most awesome moments of the road are very rarely marked on the map. It is no magic, the magic that steals into your soul and changes the story of your life, but the spontaneous delays, the fabulous mis-turnings, the time when you must put away your neatly sketched maps, and just gawk about.
The theme of the song is initiated through a small tensed friction, a disturbance to the smooth flow of plan. A road is closed to be fixed, a train is like it is not running, a rainy date makes you stand under the awning of a store that you had no idea that you were going to visit. Almost always, when you encounter something you have not seen/read/heard about before, the first feeling is a surge of anxiety, a rush of frustration. The schedule is violated, the timeline is dissolved. A sense of injustice sinks. we check the phone, and can do all we can to reroute, to reassert control, to push the world back into the tidy boxes of our anticipations. This point of rupture is a point where we have to make choices, though not necessarily on a visible road, but in our own souls. We can battle against the stream and get frustrated and bitter by each moment that we cannot control in the way we want, or we can take a deep breath and put the phone in the pocket, and relent.
It is not a weak thing, to submit to this; it is a thing of great strength as well as wisdom. It is the time when we allow ourselves to be lost. That it is in losing which we do really find. When you take off the tyranny of the destination your senses wake like long slumbers. You are not looking any more only to find the next turn, you are seeing. You experience the complexity of the detail of moss growing on a weather worn stone wall, the way a late afternoon sun is filtering through the leaves of a tree you saw for the first time, the slightly worn elegance of a hand painted sign over a long forgotten workshop. Not only you can hear the traffic, but you hear the faraway sound of a church bell, the shouts of children, playing somewhere in a secret courtyard, and you can feel the very tune of an unfamiliar language that you cannot exactly make out, but it is present in your heart. The loop which appeared as a curse turns to a medium of presence.
That dead end highway puts you on a winding seaside route, a route the computerized trip planner said was inefficient,but which opens to you in awesome vistas of crashing waters and soaring escarpment, a display of natural glory that no fancy planning could ever conceive. That train that took off in a sleepy town in Italy, that turned out to be a disaster at first, takes you to a small trattoria where everything is shut down yet runs by a nonna, who does not speak a word of English, but with whom you manage to converse with, through the only common denominator, the food, who proceeds to give you a plate of pasta so simplistic, yet so perfect that you will think you have had a communion, a memory that will serve to warm you in years to come. The mistaken turn down a maze of alleys in Marrakech, out of the tourist crowded square can take you into the softer humming of a coppersmith hammer, an artisan whose family has worked there since time immemorial, who offers you a glass of mint tea, and gives you a glimpse of his world, a personal interaction and contact of far more worth than any trinket.
The magic does not only lie in these sweeping movie scenes, but it is embedded into the tissue of minor smaller deviations. It is the choice of however to go down one of the cobble stone lanes where they find a secret garden and a garden that is blooming in the face of the urban jungle. It is running out of the rain in a chance bookstore and coming across a book of poetry that fits like a glove to your soul and it is by an author you have never heard of. It is saying yes to a random invitation by a fellow tourist to share a meal with them, a conversation that continues well after midnight, a relation that will be authentic and immediate in some sense, than towards some they have known years. These are the fruits of confusion the blessings of luck.
Our society teaches us to be afraid of chaos but as a matter of fact, it is the cradle of everything. Even life was not created thanks to a tidy and arranged strategy; it was conceived as a result of a cosmic stew of probability and requirement. There is not a single greatest innovation in the history of the man that is covered in tales of happy accidents. The inventions were penicillin caused by contamination of a petri dish, Post-it notes because of a collapsed superglue, and the microwave because of a molten bar of chocolate in the pocket of a scientist. These discoveries were not possible because of a read script. They were observed because someone was doing something dealing with one aspect; has been interrupted by some unexpected outcome; and was smart enough to say, What is this? not,but “How do I put myself back on track?”. It is the attitude of discovering magic in just-made side trips, which this very spirit you are developing in the workshop of your personal life. It is to regard the surprise as it is: not as an annoyance, but as an encouragement, a signal on the part of the universe to pay more attention.
It is an attitude and a muscle that should be trained. You may begin with small. Make use of an alternative way to work. Become a step early as you are getting off the bus and walk rest of the distance. Shop in the grocery store with no list and make a meal using what moves you. Go to a corner of the city you live in and have not been before. Be guided by the curiosity. Do not rush to fill all free time with a program or some trend. Wait until you are bored, and then the seeds of curiosity will get put in other words at the soil of boredom. Stop expecting all of your experiences to be fruitful or ideal. A wasted afternoon is an afternoon you spent in trying to make sense, trying to fight ignorance, trying to win the world.
Consider life to be jazz. The big musicians are familiar with the makes up of chords, the initial tune that is the scheme. However, the astonishing glory of jazz performance is in an improvising part of it, notes found in the instant, improvised call and response of the players. A performer who has strictly followed the written letters would be technically good but soul vacuous. A life that is lived merely according to the plan is very similar. The deviations are our solos, our times to improvise, to play our own special melody to answer to the world around us and it rhythm.
This demands that we have to redesign our rapport with being lost. We relate it with fear, openness, and inability. But to lose oneself physically in a world of satellite monitoring is a gift that need hardly be described as frequent. It imposes independence. It makes you honed on instinct. You are taught to watch the sun, to seek advice, an insecure, yet gorgeous faculty of human association, to go with your instinct. Getting lost in the sea of emotions or the career is quite similar. Losing a job, a love relationship, or a dream one has had a long time seems like experiencing a dreadful vacuum. That gap is also the realm of potentiality. It is a detour that you did not plan; it destroys the identity in your mind, and makes you ask bigger questions; Who am I without this job? What would I miss without this individual? What really counts now? No road back out of such a “lost” ever goes straightforward but is even so a road back to an ever truer self.
We then must clutch our plans lightly, and, like hints whispered by a good friend, not as dictated by a hard taskmaster. The plan can take you to the city, the plan cannot take you to the secret courtyard where the old man fires his violin strings every evening around dusk. Planning can help you secure the job interview, but it could not previously help you in planning the meeting of your boss in the elevator that gets you the equally different and much more exciting opportunity. The trellis is the plan, yet life is the unruly and perhaps unexpected vine which grows in directions we will never be able to imagine. To grasp such trellis only, is to lose the beauty of the flower.
Then shut the road up. You mind the spoor, and we will see the train be late. Raise then down Thou carefully framed edifice of a day. Between the debris, gasp the air and have a look-about. It is in the surprisal gap space, which opens up there, that the magic occurs. It is the look of the unexpected, the largess of the unplanned. It is not the realization that the universe is more imaginative than we are, or that the finest things of our tale will be written in its margins, on the bypaths, in the life-enhancing detours we never intended to take. It is not a journey to an arrival but to a becoming and the final becoming is done when we truly have temerity to walk off the track.
This fearlessness in taking wrong turns is not the blind indulgence, but a silent belief. It is belief in the strength of your own soul, in confidence that you have the inner resources to ensure somehow outcome against the odds. It is also a great trust in the world itself, a show of confidence that behind the girdle of your own selected experience there is not that threatening empty place, but a countryside that is full of opportunities to be kind and beautiful and be related. And we are fed so much to think the world is a dangerous place, it is a set of risks, that we need to manage and mitigate. Such a worldview is openly contrasted with a detour. It makes you deal with the world as it is and nine times out of ten, the world can surprise you with such graciousness. The other wearing a real smile on his face when giving directions, the small-town mechanic who will not stop giving you the benefit of the doubt, the family members who will happily share a picnic with you to help pass the time when the cafe in the park is closed–these are the experiences that make the alternative of fearful and cynical living not worth a damn. They are not much miracles of human decency which you would not even have been in a position to get had your original plan not been derailed.
The problem is that our addiction to the plan has roots underlying something more primordial than mere desire of efficiency. It relates to our terror of death and our great unease at the fact that life has no order or pattern. A carefully controlled life seems a protection against anarchy, an active control of the universe, which is indifferent to what we want most of the time. We are creating a linear narrative in our lives education-career-family-retirement and hold on to it as it makes our brief lives more order-bound and purposeful. A digression is a hole in this text chronicle. It makes us know that we are not God and that life can be a wild and unpredictable thing. This warning can be frightening, and at the same time it is empowering. It liberates us of the huge burden of needing to know all the answers. It provides the leeway, to think that the finest version of our life story may not be the one we worked on in full well before hand, but can be seen in unanticipated and unplanned edits through a sequence of unexpected twists.
This letting go mechanism always creates a more subtle, rich empathy. An event of a plan breaking down usually leaves you vulnerable. You are put awe. You have to accept that you do not know it all, that you need assistance. And it is this vulnerability, which our society perceives to be weakness, that is most fertile soil of true human connection. Consider the boss who has to work with a time limit, who has a flight that does not come, leaving her in a run down town. Her wild anger is replaced by a lazy calm afternoon of roaming. She is seen in one of the local libraries, discussing the history of the town with a librarian, or in a bench in the park, spending her time discussing it with an old resident. A day is all she has to be a human being, like other people and not a title and a position. She can look into their lives, listen to their stories, and her closed world unfolds. Not only is she refreshed after a vacation, she is transformed and now she has an appreciation of the lives and stories that other people live and that go untold, often slated to pass her by, had she succeeded in carrying out her own plan. This is the chemistry of the detour; this dissolves the armour of our self reliance and remodels us into kinder beings.
The detour is a rebellious move in a culture that capitalizes on the altar of productivity. It is rooted by its nature highly inefficient. However, we have to learn to make a difference between the mere efficiency, which only transfers us to a new destination and the so-called productive inefficiency, which promotes growth, learning, and a feeling of marvel. It is the memories that are created in the assumed time wasted on a scenic route. It is through the very hours that you spent trying to find a word to make yourself understood in a language you are not talking, that you have to learn the most about patience and humility. The short way answers the schedule, the wavy path the soul. The life may be full of neat, straight lines and it may be good on a resume, but it has the danger of being a flat, empty plain. It is the by-paths, those unexpected rises and those secret valleys, those things which without warning all at once open before one and leave one breathless with wonder, that make a life rich, deep, and richly worth living. We are not robots and we are not meant to work to the peak. We are creatures of experience and the most fruitful experiences are hardly the most efficient ones.
Look at the nature of your own recollection itself. Which are the tales you repeat and repeat? More often it is not the story of a day when all goes according to plan. You do not narrate the flow of journey, which was not late according to the schedule or the meeting which had taken place at the appointed time. You narrate about that experience when your car had stalled in the middle of a deserted area and you had been saved by a group of travelling musicians. My story of wandering aimlessly in Venice and finding the best gelato you have ever known is profiled by you. You narrate about the camping trip that turned out to be a disaster with it raining all day but you all had such a good laugh that you cried. Our minds are programmed to digitize what is new, what is shocking, what is up-setting. An ordinary, non-problematic experience always tends to flow through our minds like water. It is the friction of the detour that makes the heat, that makes the spark that burns a moment into our consciousness as well. Without a detour a life runs the risk of being forgotten, actually by the life who lived it.
This readiness to live in the unknown, to live in the detour, is what the poet John Keats termed Negative Capability, the readiness to be in the uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without irritable reaching, struggling to make definite, after fact and reason. This is a superpower in our hyper-infested world. We are brought up in a situation where we expect instant answers, to clear all indecisiveness, to have a plan and a contingency to the plan. A detour leads us into the Negative Capability. We do not know automatically where we are, how this is going to work out and what we are going to do. Being willing to sit in that discomfort, to inhale the lack of knowing and hope that it will bring clarity and a way will be shown is a very spiritual thing. It is the art of letting go of our white knuckled need to know what is true and to leave open the potential that there is magic. It is not ignoring the fact that the best available answers are usually only discovered after we have had the audacity to live some time with the questions.
Even the physiological aspect to this magic exists. Our brain is on auto-pilot when we are performing according to a routine, when we are doing what we have prepared, when we are on the beaten track or when we are fulfilling according to a schedule. It involves activation of known nerve pathways to save energy. It is not growing, and it is efficient. A detour causes a jolt to the brain that goes into high alert. It has to establish new bonds, to perceive new stimuli, to react to new problems. It is made to be more participative, more plastic, more active. Getting lost is not just a metaphor of more vivid life; it is an actual exercise of brain involved and it is a stretch that is flexible, strong and young. Every mistake, every surprise, is constructing a more complicated and strong cognitive structure.
After all, the willingness to fall out of the course is way beyond geography. It is a philosophy to live a full life. It is the desire not only to have some detour to a conversation, but really listen to a view point that opposes what you have so strongly believed, not to wait till it is your turn to talk. It is the courage to leave a safe but dissatisfying path of career, and go off in search of a passion that might have no obvious resolution. The grace to accept that it is not always possible to develop a predictable script to a relationship and the deepest connections are said to be made when we can but trust that relationships we form will take on a rather unexpected turn and in that very manner leave us with the most memorable moments of our lives. It is the inner voyages that count most of all and it is the diversions that send us out of ourselves and thus, personally, out of our own narrow certainties that are of the greatest value. They point us to a little more humble, a little more generous, a little more wonder-struck knowledge of ourselves, of others and of our little and lovely pedestal in the great un-designable things.
