Lost and Found

Dante begins his epic and autobiographical poem with the words,

“Midway upon the journey of my life

I found myself in a dark wood

For the straightforward path having been lost[1]”

Dante was 35 when he wrote those words. I have increasingly come to realise that as we approach the middle of our life that we perceive the spectre of a potential dark wood up ahead. We may confuse it with death, but it is something else. When we sense it up ahead, we intuitively find ways to shrink back or avoid finding ourselves there….and lost.

What is the ‘lost’ we fear? I think it the deep fear that in that place we won’t know who we are. A loss of identity. Such a fear is second only to the fear of death itself. Both fears are called ‘existential’, because they are fears rooted in our very existence as humans.  

A friend, well into her midlife, said to me once, ‘I can’t stop working because I fear I will become irrelevant’. The fear of not doing is so deep in our consciousness. It is indeed a dark wood and it is easy to see why we fear we will lose ourselves there.

It is this fear of loss of identity that keeps us running hard and fast down roads even when we don’t know where they will lead us.  We dare not lift our heads up and ask ourselves where the road is actually going.

It is the fear that keeps us chained to our technology even when we are supposed to be on vacation. (‘Will people think I’m doing nothing? Will people think about me at all?).

It’s the fear that keeps us from listening to the tap on the shoulder, inviting us to our real life’s work (Jung said our real, meaningful life’s work didn’t begin until the second half of life. What most of us call ‘life’, is just prep and training).

It’s the fear that stops us making the journey to the lost and ignored parts of ourselves, where much treasure lies, because we fear that as we dive, we will get lost in discovering that there is no one actually there; An ocean-scape of I-don’t-know-who-I-am-ness.

Doing nothing turns out to be the ultimate, feared ending.

It’s not surprising we feel this way. We have all been nurtured on a map of life that doesn’t work in the real world, yet no one ever stops to question it and rebuild our parenting, our education and our work processes based on one that is more timeless and true[2].

We have grown up with a deep script that says,

I am, is doing              (not doing = I am not)

Doing is meaning       (not doing = meaningless)

Doing is useful            (not doing = useless)

Doing is presence       (not doing = unseen)

Doing is significance  (not doing = insignificant)

But here is what I have been learning this year.

Up until now, if ‘doing’ is how I judge whether I am on the right path in life, then when I feel like I’ve lost the path then the answer is to find a new ‘doing’. For some that will mean going back to doing the things you enjoyed or were good at before and doing them again.  For others, accepting the end of one particular season of our life, will look for something different to do. But this is only a recycled doing. The wrapping of ‘doing’ activity may have changed, but the core, the identity’s addiction to ‘doing’, remains the same.

We cannot conceive of a truer identity, me, without it being about what I’m doing. It’s like an artist who has always painted with their right hand. They went through different seasons -  a watercolour season, an oil season, an acrylic season – but it was always with the right hand. And then one day someone comes along and says that you can create whole new forms of art. The artist instantly looks for some new form that their right hand can master, but the wise guide says, ‘no, no, it’s not to be found with your right hand anymore. You’ve outlived that. It’s now going to come from left-handedness.’ The artist feels bewildered, frustrated, fearful, depressed, angry – ‘I cannot even conceive how I can ever make new art with my left hand!’

How could I ever be someone of value to myself and the world unless it involves ‘doing’?

To go down a path that isn’t about doing will lead me to…doing nothing, which means be nothing. I heard the cry of a 59-year-old banking executive at the end of one of my recent talks lament what he was being encouraged to the side-lines because the bank wanted him to make way for a younger person. (I am frequently hearing the same story in Professional Service organisations). After 59 years of life experience he was staring down the barrel of the gun called ‘nothing’. ‘Who am I now?!” 

I have come to see this threshold as possibly the most existentially difficult challenge offered to every midlife adult desiring and being invited to become elder and not just older.

I often think of the words uttered in a different context – ‘Who then can be saved??[3] What you are suggesting feels impossible’.

One thing that I have been convinced of is that we cannot navigate this challenge on our own. We need elders to aid the birth of elders. Only those who have unlocked the route for themselves through this seemingly impossible threshold can help others find their own way through the dark passage. Left to ourselves we only know the map we have used up until now (the artists right-hand). But there is another map and it is only learned from wise sages and travellers who have already moved along that journey.

So, what am I learning from my wise guides on navigating the deepest of mid-life’s questions?

That it starts with love. I could never have embraced that answer when I was younger. Not even ten years ago, if I’m honest. My mind may have assented to ‘love is all you need’, but my life script has been ‘Trevor gets things done’. And I’m sorry to say that one trumped the other for most of my life. Until it didn’t. Until it served notice that it had done its job.

There is a fear, an anxiousness, a drivenness, in the questions, What am I doing? What will I be doing? What do I do? that actually distances us personally from engaging with our deeper, truer self. Love allows the space and the grace to look at the old question in a new way, because love reveals that everything no longer depends on it. Life isn’t a straight line from arrival to departure.  It is a journey of liberation, uncovering and recovering that revolves around the certainty that we are already deeply and unchangeably loved at our core; that all we had hoped our ‘doing’ would provide, we already have. So, from such a place of love, acceptance and belonging what do I want to contribute in the world and how do I want to be in the world?

There is great vulnerability in love. Love lives in a place of openness, learning, connection and of not knowing and not presuming. “I am going to make difference”, carries the danger of arrogance and ego, that suggests that I know what the other person needs and I’m going to do it regardless.

Love has a responsive voice.

What do I hear? What do I see?

Where is there a sense of life’s-force at work and how might I be invited to cooperate with that?

Love invites a lot more kindness, patience, humility and paying attention. Less control.

Love is a different dance than doing.

I’m paying less and less attention to the question I’m asking – “What am I doing?’ - and a lot more to how I am asking the question. Do I hear an anxiety, fear, frustration, despair? Or do I hear a doorway of curiosity lined with hope.

When I want answers to my questions, I hear the voice of the poet Rilke saying to me,

‘Be patient with all that is unresolved and try to love the questions themselves…[4]’

And when I feel lost, I hear the voice of David Wagoner in the conclusion of his penetrating poem Lost,

‘Stand still.

The forest knows where you are.

You must let it find you[5]’

Trevor Waldock Dec 2024

[1] Dante Alighieri  The Divine Comedy  c1308-21

[2] I’ll address this more in a future article

[3] Matthew 19:26

[4] Rainer Maria Rilke    Letters to a young poet

[5] Lost by David Wagoner  in Traveling Light: Collected & New Poems 1999