No One Finds His Way Without Getting Lost First

Until we feel lost, we do not begin to find ourselves. This reflection by Henry David Thoreau highlights the personal confrontation necessary to find ourselves. Admitting that we have been lost is not easy, coming to accept it puts our strength to the limit.

As human beings, we continue to suffer from every failure, disappointment or event that contradicts our schemes. What really costs us to accept is not that we are lost, but that we have lost control over ourselves.

Control is one of the most important aspects of human behavior. It plays  a very important role in the generation and survival of psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, pathological gambling, etc. Everyone, at some time in life, has lost ourselves experiencing strong symptoms of anxiety or depression, states in which we cannot or do not want to understand anything.

We have to pay attention to the strategies that we have been using until reaching these critical situations. Analyzing the behaviors and thoughts that have led us to hit rock bottom, we will understand that sometimes attempts to control are not the solution, but the problem.

Being lost brings us closer to ourselves

How do you get to know yourself? To begin with, we have to stop seeing ourselves with the masks that we bring out when we interact with others. Knowing oneself requires an investment in time and energy – two of our limited resources – but the gratification of achieving it can come with the terrible feeling of not understanding absolutely anything that happens to us.

All people sooner or later come face to face with ourselves and we will have to answer each other if we really want to give meaning to our lives. There comes a time in our existence in which we only have two options: either we take another attitude towards life and try to be comfortable with ourselves or we give up everything for lost and that life does what it wants with us. It is when we say that a person has given up.

As strange as it may seem, losing ourselves can be a great stroke of fortune, an experience from which we come out knowing each other more and knowing more. We change so much that we begin to do things that we were not used to and we see parts of ourselves that we did not know, in short, we learn to really listen to ourselves.

Get lost to find

You have to lose yourself, to be able to find yourself, even to really get to know yourself for the first time. He thinks that developing ourselves fully as human beings is incompatible with an absolute alienation, with the denial of reflection and with the absence of sincerity before life and the world.

Whoever claims to be in possession of great truths may be basing his presumed certainties on foundations alien to him, insecure and uncertain. On the other hand, someone who is not afraid of getting lost and walking through life, who has not renounced their own reality, knows that they have few certainties and truths. However, he is master of himself and the joy of living with hope.

According to a study published in the journal Psychology Today, it is normal that our mind needs to get lost in order to organize ideas and thoughts. In this way we escape for a time from the reality that surrounds us and then return stronger and the possibility of exercising greater control.