Lost?

Someone once said that to find yourself you must first be lost. But what is finding yourself? Is it simply knowing yourself? But then how well do any of us really know ourselves? Unless placed in a specific situation can we honestly answer what our response or actions would be? We can all surmise what we would or wouldn’t do but unless we are actually placed in the scenario do we truly know? I would like to think that I know how I would behave if for example I saw somebody being attacked or if I saw a child run out in front of a car but without it ever actually happening I don’t think I could hold my hand on my heart and say that is what I would do.

Maybe it is something deeper than that, maybe I need to be lost first before I could even contemplate answering this. Life is a constant discovery of oneself, from the moment we are born our brains start to learn and adapt and continue to do so until our last breath. Life and the people around us help mould us in our formative years into the person we are now. We subconsciously draw from every encounter we make, we mimic characteristics we like in others, adapt them for ourselves. So in effect knowing ourselves we must know those around us. How many times has a sibling said to you “you are just like mum when you do that.”? Or “you remind me of such and such when you look like that.”?

I picture our path of discovery and growth as a lump of plasticine. Initially unformed, but soon we take shape, then along the way we meet and bump into other lumps of plasticine and bits of us adhere to them just as bits of them adhere to us and before too long we are no longer as pure as we once were. There are now lots of different bits of coloured plasticine, bits of grit and dirt, grim and filth we have picked up along the way. We are now an amalgamation of our continuing growth, relationships, wrong turns and right turns. We are not only the decisions we have made along the way but partly the decisions made by others around us. I’m sure most of us at some point in our lives, either as children or now as parents have had a piece of plasticine like this and have tried to clean it of all the dirt, tried to separate all the foreign bodies and return it to the solitary colour it once was. It might be too far to go as to say it’s impossible but it can’t be far from it. To remove every speck of dust it has picked up, every stray hair, every bit of colour from another would take a life time of work and patience. And for every speck removed I’m sure another would soon attach itself. I wonder if at any point in our life we would ever be as pure as that which we first were.

As I write this I am becoming aware of the spiritual aspect to the questions being posed and maybe God, in whatever form you believe is the only answer. Maybe only he or she would have the patience and willingness to cleanse what has been so appallingly tarnished and transformed from the original form. Maybe it’s at the point that we drop to our knees and cry out for help that we have become truly lost. The years of constant bombardment from the world’s effluence has left us so burdened that we have no option but to fall to our knees.

Will we ever find ourselves? Maybe not, maybe we do need to get lost first; maybe we need to ask for help out of the maze of life before we can be found.



Maybe we need to find ourselves in others and them in us to truly understand who we really are.