Getting Lost

  The walk down Eglinton Avenue winds into a neighbourhood called "Leaside", and it feels like a completely different world. Where there was traffic, now there are just a lot of trees and residential areas. The roads curve gently, leading from an industrial area on Laird Road to a much more luxurious area, complete with newly renovated and very big, expensive-looking houses. I can't tell whether this place is quiet and gorgeous, or lonely and isolating. Perhaps it's a combination of both. In heaven, nothing bad happens, but then again, one could say nothing really happens period. All I know is that there are few people interacting, few cars travelling, and only a stray and very friendly young female cat sauntering around to welcome strangers.
     The feeling I got while walking that long road was: when will I find something familiar, as well as the other contradictory feeling of "hope to continue to explore the unfamiliar". And I noticed that when I was ready to eat, I longed for the familiar intersection where I could find food. But otherwise, I relish the experience of the unknown. And I wondered whether it is perhaps sometimes beneficial to get lost for the sake of getting lost, rather than always feeling I have to know where I am at all times.
   It's interesting how not having a reference point can be so frightening. But what I observe in myself is that one needs space to allow an unknown element to emerge, since who we think we  are is only a fraction of possibilities. It is especially frightening to try to bear all one is without trying to change it into something else. In Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron remarks about meditation:

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether has to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves, we're here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later...So come as you are. The magic is being willing to open to that, being wtilling to be fully awake to that. (p.3)

Chodron likens meditation and loving kindness practices to a process of willful discovery, being awake to who one really is. I find this practice can be interesting and confusing at the same time. It's interesting in that meditation pushes a person to just be present with the material of the mind, without trying to embellish upon it or make it into something else. When I am able to do this, I let go of trying to make the situation different from how it is, and I can befriend all the conditions inside and around me. But what is needed is a kind of renunciation of reference points, and that is easier said than done. The reference points I am talking about are like the compass points on a map: the sense of who we 'think' we are, the feeling of where we want to go, our sense of inner wants, our preferences, presumptions, as well as the unconscious standards that shape a person. Without this gradual letting go, the process of being lost becomes daunting. I tend to think that meditation itself is the anchor point to let us know that no matter how lost we feel we are never actually lost: we have our method, our practice and our minds.

Chodron, Pema (1991), Wisdom of No Escape. Boston: Shambhala.