lost

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Not long ago, I was talking with a fellow who was something like my age, telling him about hitchhiking across the United States, twice.

"I could never do that," he said. "I'd feel lost."

His remark brought me up short. Never once during those hitchhiking adventures had I felt lost. Whether standing with my thumb out on the plains of Wyoming or wishing a car helpful car would come along in the snows of Maine ... it just never occurred to me to be lost.

Who hasn't felt lost at one time or another, in one way or another? What a sinking, helpless feeling it is. And yet....

Maybe it's a good lesson. How can anyone be lost unless they decide to be lost? How could anyone be lost without some bedrock sense of not being lost at all?

Or, as a Buddhist acquaintance once put it, "wherever you go, there you are."
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