How to Get Lost

And maybe find some inspiration.

Somewhere in South Dakota.

When I first moved to Los Angeles (like a million years ago), I drove across the country with my sister. We took our time. Visited friends along the way, slept in shitty roadside motels, stopped at places like the Corn Palace, which we learned about from the thirty-five billboards counting down our relative distance to it on Interstate 90.

We also got lost in a Nebraskan cornfield (corn seems to have been a theme on this trip, I wonder what Jung would have made of that), landed a room at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone even though the entire hotel had been booked solid for months (there happened to be a no-show the evening we arrived) and almost drove straight into a wildfire in the Nevada desert in the middle of the night. I was driving and I remember thinking there was something wrong with the car because everything reeked of smoke. But it was pitch black, the next services were like 50 miles away, and we had no idea what was going on because we didn’t have iPhones.

If I were planning the same trip today, I would spend weeks researching routes to find the ones with the best roadside attractions, the weirdest places to stay, the least offensive places to eat. And every day I would be looking on my phone to make sure I wasn’t driving right past some critical display of Americana. It would be fun, but the whole vibe of the trip would be different.

What we’ve gained in convenience we’ve lost in adventure.

Don’t get me wrong — I do love to plan the perfect itinerary. I also love my Watch Duty wildfire tracking app. But sometimes it just feels like there’s nothing left to discover in real life anymore. Everything has been endlessly documented, posted, and geotagged, and then everyone goes to the same places, eats the same food, takes the same photo.

What does this do to our creativity?

Research studies have found mixed results, but speaking purely anecdotally, I think it totally effs it up. You don’t need to be curious or have real interests — you can just go wherever the algorithm takes you.

But sometimes it’s good to get lost.

When I feel creatively stuck or stagnant, I like to go for a drive or a walk with no set destination. It forces me to pay attention to my surroundings and navigate with my intuition.

The other day, I left my phone at home and went on a destinationless sunset walk with a friend. For some reason, I wanted to turn down a dead end street in my neighborhood that I’d never been on before. We were up high, almost at the top of the mountain, and had a gorgeous view. At the end of the street, we discovered a secret set of stairs and a tree-lined path that led to the street below.

I’d been feeling depressed before the walk, but afterwards I felt better, inspired even. And as I’m writing this, I’m realizing I may have actually been down those stairs before — in a recurring dream (!).

Before I moved to my current neighborhood, I lived in Silverlake, a neighborhood that also had secret staircases, and I used to have this dream where I discovered a Silverlake staircase that looked very much like the one I found in real life the other day.

In the dream I had the sense that the stairs were some kind of portal. I’ll let you know if the real life stairs end up being one. No luck so far.

Anyway, my point is sometimes it’s good to leave your phone at home and chart your own course. You never know what you might find.

Until next time,

Tara