Get lost!

I was 26 when I visited Istanbul. Me and a friend, no roaming internet connection, just passports, little folder stuffed with printed maps and handwritten directions that would hopefully enable us to reach our hostel.

These travels, before the age when I began to feel like I could trust my sense of self, were thrilling. This was, in part, down to the adrenaline brought on by the chaos of it all. The last days of relying on our heads and pre-planning. Our noses, senses, and guts. I enjoy the convenience of today’s transformed landscape of connectivity, but what are we losing by always knowing where we are?

In Istanbul we walked into a mucky little bar and were sucked straight into the magnetic field of king bar fly. He was Irish, tight jeans, straggly, shoulder-length hair, and his aura roared, crackling and spitting deep orange embers.

‘Hiya mate’ opened my friend.

‘BOYS!’ He chortled, getting off his tall stool, flicking his hair back over his shoulder as he pulled each of us in for a hug we didn’t feel we’d earned, having just met him for the first time. And we were his for the next half hour and two beers, basking in his tales of misadventure.

He lived there, so we asked him what we should be doing while in the city.

‘GET LOST!’ He said it several times, and assured us that if we wanted to experience Istanbul properly, we should stop trying to plot, and plunge arse first into its vibrancy and mystique. All those humming side streets and spellbinding bazaars. This wasn’t travel advice, it was wisdom, and so much better than TripAdvisor.

I try to ensure that despite my role as a father of two five-year-olds and a busy business owner, I carve out time for new experiences, crowbar in a little jeopardy and adventure. I seek the sense of being lost, even if I have to engineer it.

I push my coaching clients to do this. Most of them, in some way, have settled for something that could be challenged, redirected for personal illumination, and tiny thrills.

Last weekend, a fellow father described how he recognised his son, a teenage victim of the Covid-19 lockdowns, had no wayfinding skills so he would take him places a few postcodes away and let him walk back. After a series of phone calls to his dad, mildly distressed, describing the strange places he’d found himself, he managed to get back on track, steadily rebuilding a crucial component of independence.

We’re connected all the time, and if we let ourselves, we’ll never be lost again. And that is an ugly purple bruise on our curiosity, our ability to be truly present, the way we were in that bar in Istanbul. How can we truly appreciate what we have if we never mislay it with the real threat of never having it again?

And it needn’t be overseas, or even beyond your own postcode. Change is accessible at all times, but we forget that.

Go out and look for it. Get lost.