I have always been a walker. Given the possibility and practicality, I would walk to most of my destinations. And living in New York, a city for walkers, I often forget that a route is not always as easy when I’m not on familiar ground. This was brought home to me on a short stay in downtown Los Angeles recently. I had checked the distance on Google Maps between my hotel and somewhere I needed to go. The map assured me the trip was a little over a mile. “I’ll just walk,” I thought.
Halfway through, having crossed multi-lane roads, tiptoed under a bypass and reached the end of the street I was supposed to follow, I’d somehow missed my turning. Retracing my steps, I realised the map hadn’t accounted for having to climb a set of steps to cross a highway via an overpass that was way too close to traffic for my liking. Only then could I make that supposedly simple turn. It was a frustrating and time-consuming experience, but what stood out was how it felt to get lost along the way. Once I realised I’d lost my bearings and hadn’t yet figured out the right way forward, my heart suddenly started beating a little faster and a sense of panic crept in. I began looking around intently for any street signs and someone to ask for directions. But everyone was zooming by in cars.
As I don’t get physically lost very often, the experience, though minor, stayed with me. I started thinking about how I walk through so much of life assuming things are going to go a certain way, and how very rarely things play out as I imagine. And when, inevitably, an unexpected turn or apparent dead end occurs, there are so many ways it can feel like suddenly being lost, except with exponentially more stress, worry and even pain.
The truth is, we will all get lost at some point in our lives (repeatedly, in fact), to varying degrees of disorientation. When we lose or leave a job. When we lose or leave a partner. When we have to deal with our own or someone else’s health condition. When we experience an act of violence against our minds, bodies or spirits that shifts our sense of safety in the world. There are countless ways to feel like we have lost our way but, at the root of it all, is the fact that we don’t have as much control of our lives (or of other people) as we want or like to think.
When I think about how we live, and what practices and mindsets might contribute to a deepening wellness, I suspect that one could be a greater acknowledgment and acceptance that our life journey never fully turns out in all the ways we hope. What can be gained from learning to honour this unpredictability? I think it can invite a transformative shift, moving our perspective of life’s uncertainty from being debilitating or worry-laden to one a little more freeing and expansive.
It allows us to imagine new possibilities and to grow with life’s changes. But maybe more importantly, it also prepares us to anticipate that things will happen in life that, even with their deep challenges, may be an opportunity to learn two profound lessons: that we are capable of more than what we believe and able to change course or rise as an occasion demands; and that trusting in the unfolding of our lives can reveal the sacredness of all parts of it.
I needed to navigate from where I was, not from where I wished I could be
Many years ago, during my final year of graduate school, I was overwhelmed by everything I was juggling: classes, a teaching internship and job applications. I was also in the midst of an as-yet-unresolved conflict with my father. Stressed with all my obligations, I told myself that I’d make it through graduation and then visit my father, when I’d be fully present to work things out.
He died unexpectedly a few months before I graduated. It was the first time I truly had to reckon with a new depth of pain and helplessness — and with realising that I can never fully know what the road ahead of me might bring, even when I think I have it mapped out.
So, given that life’s unpredictability is true for all of us, how do we learn to lean into that transformative shift — the posture that opens a possibility to better weathering those times when, for any number of reasons, we are set off course and feel lost within the journey of our own lives?
I started walking labyrinths sometime in my twenties. There was one carved out from a garden and laid with stone squares at a Catholic retreat close to my graduate university. One of my favourites was a large canvas labyrinth laid out on a resort property by the glistening blue waters of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. While leading a week-long workshop there, I’d wake early in the morning and slip out to walk it before breakfast. In a unicursal labyrinth, there is only one way to both enter and exit, and I’ve found following the single path around a series of twists to be a meditative practice. I’ve also come to think of these labyrinths as a metaphor. Once inside, you think you can tell which way the path will turn next. Yet as you wind your way around, the centre can look much closer or further than it really is.
Over the years, these walks have been a way for me to remember — to honour — whatever leg of my journey I am currently on. Needless to say, at the time when I lost my father, I wasn’t sure how I would move beyond it. As I still had so much to do to finish graduate school, I tried to bypass a necessary grieving process. I went into autopilot.
But I soon discovered that it wasn’t going to work. I needed to navigate from where I was, not from where I wished I could be. All I could do was the very next thing, one day after the other, one sleepless or sleep-filled night after the other. All the while trusting in an unspoken way that eventually I’d take enough steps to recognise some familiarity with my life again, to find it again.
If we pay attention to what each leg of the journey is asking of us, could it teach us that there is something sacred enough about our lives in any given season that warrants our respecting its larger unfolding, beyond what we know or can control? There was something both sacred and mundane about having to simply put one foot in front of the other after my father’s death, without any certainty of how it would all add up. It was a powerful lesson in learning to trust in my own strength to sustain me in ways I didn’t know were possible, but also in learning that owning my vulnerability could allow me to trust in the strength of my community. I began to understand that both types of strength are necessary for living well.
There’s another interesting aspect to these labyrinths I’ve walked that makes me think of how we view one another’s journeys. The width of the path is only large enough for one person at a time. Someone may be behind or in front of you, but no one else can share the journey on the exact point you are on. So though you may be walking side by side with someone, that person is on a leg of their path that is right next to yours. But you are the only one at the particular point on your path and they are the only one on theirs.
It’s a powerful visual reminder of how important it is to recognise the ways we walk alone and together in life, which will steer all of us off our set course to some degree, at some point. But it doesn’t mean you are lost forever, even when it feels like it. It just may mean that sometimes, in order to live your life well, the most faithful and appropriate thing you can do is to place one foot in front of the other, in the general direction of where you hope to go.
Enuma Okoro is an FT columnist
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022
