Getting Lost and Finding Yourself

Robert Frost, a notable poet once wrote:

'Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less travelled by,And that has made all the difference."

The best adventures always begin with getting lost. Whether you've taken a wrong turn on the road home or taken a wrong turn in your life itself, there comes a moment where you must stop and ask yourself- what now? It's in that moment that you will face yourself, stand bare with gritted teeth to analyse your shortcomings and truly realise your strengths. "Am I capable?" you will ask. Then you turn the other way, look at the paths that fork in front of you and you choose the path that you feel bravest to follow and you follow it and don't look back...well, until you get lost again.

All hungry travellers and nomads like myself know this feeling all too well. You see, we choose to get lost. Why? Because there is not a feeling more thrilling and life-affirming than the feeling of having your whole life ahead of you, completely blank and wanting to be written by nobody but yourself. I believe that feeling is known as 'absolute freedom'. I also believe that it's not a feeling that the majority of people can truthfully say they have owned.

Can you?

Don't get me wrong; I am not implying that freedom is a black and white subject. The root of freedom essentially is choice and sadly the world is too cruel to allow for everyone to be born with choices. At the far end of the spectrum there is poverty, famine, sexism, slavery and many other horrifying atrocities that billions of people are faced with from the moment they enter the world. The sad reason is that elite members of societies do not want to relinquish control, delegate power and give choice to others, right? However, while we may not all be born with our human rights impeached, aren't we all born into a society that controls us to an extent? I mean, nobody is handed a blank page in the delivery room. Some of us are however handed an eraser. Therefore freedom is a multidimensional concept and if we have any freedom at all, we also have the ability to choose how strongly we want to associate with it.

I myself am twenty-four years old, and until I started travelling, I could not truthfully say that I had any sense of freedom. Personally, from a very young age I have been all but too aware of a kind of 'societal control' that has dominated and influenced the course of my life and my actions within it. Sour thoughts that my life was not my own lingered over me and a feeling of unease and distrust of myself grew stronger and stronger with every year I got older. Therefore, I feel like I have I've always understood what true freedom meant and I knew it was not mine, so my main goal in life was to attain it. Like Truman in The Truman Show, I felt like I needed to climb into a boat, ride the storm to the edge of the world and escape from the control that was so intrinsically woven around me, as it is around you too.

So, when I turned 18 and had completed compulsory education it hit me that I had a choice that I didn't have before. After sitting and staring blankly at the book of my life that I had resented for so long, it suddenly occurred to me that everything was only ever PENCILED in and out of all the options I had been given, there was now a choice that wasn't written down. So I took an old battered and chewed eraser out of the pencil case that I had carried with me from classroom to classroom for too many years and I rubbed out everything in my book with wide eyes and a fresh beat in my heart. Then I took out my pen, with only a drop of ink left and I wrote this:

"I choose a path less travelled, thanks."

And I felt enlightened.

If I had chosen to follow what was written in my book, I would have gone to university, studied hard in an academic field and got a good job with prospects and a high salary. I would have been moderately successful. My parents would have been pleased with me. However, I couldn’t help but be too aware that I would end up without an identity. I would work to live, to go out with my friends at the weekend, to buy nice cushions for my nice sofa in my nice house and have enough to be able to pay the bills at the end of the month that I have somehow accumulated without realising- mortgage, electricity, car payments, insurance and so on and so on. Many people within our society might argue that these bills can't be avoided, they are just part of growing up, a fact of life. I think that there comes a point in everyone's life where they have the ability to say 'yes' or 'no' to these things. Who forced you to go to university? Who forced you to get a regular 'grown-up' 9-5 job with a steady income? Who forced you to take a loan out so that you could afford new household appliances? Nobody. However, it would not have occurred to anybody that this is exactly how 'grown-up' life is meant to be lived unless society told you that this is the way. It is certainly what society told me to do. I was lost and I wanted a life with purpose and adventure, so the path less travelled is what I chose.

So where did my new path take me? It took me to absolute freedom. I found a way to earn money whilst travelling. There are so many ways to do this, despite what I initially thought. I got a job working on a luxury cruise ship, so instead of spending the last two and a half years fighting my way up the job ladder and spending money on things I don't need (or actually even want if I really think about it), I have gone and explored every corner of the Earth. Honestly, I have been lost more times than I can count on both hands during this time, but in the process I have also found more happiness and beauty in the world than I ever thought was possible. This is what absolute freedom gives you.

I am telling you all of this because I want to urge you to do the same. It is a terrible thought that there are some people go their whole lives without realising they had a choice about how to live their life; some of you may realise you have a choice but are happy with the comfort that you find on the path that was laid out for you- and others may realise there is a choice, but are not brave enough to take a risk and forge a new path. Those people are scared to get lost and for those people I feel sad. If that is you, I promise you with a whole heart that yes, you are right- it is damn scary, it can be terrifying in fact, but that's what life is! Life is about exploring everything within and without you. I mean, how can you experience all of what life has to offer from your living room? I don't care how warm, comforting and secure it is. The world might be a scary place, but there is so much more to it than that. You will experience feelings, emotions and forces within yourself and the world around you that are indescribably beautiful and incomparable to the handful of feelings you can experience from your living room.

If you look at your written book and don't like what you see then repeat after me and shout in your loudest volume possible: 'I choose a path less travelled, thanks!' and then throw your book into the fire, storm outside and look into the mirror. Stand bare and face yourself. Ask yourself who you are and where you want to be. Then, look around you for the path less travelled. It is the one that is unpaved, looks wild and unkempt and has fauna that is most unfamiliar to you. Dare yourself to go down there. I promise you won't even consider looking back. You will be lost in the wild world forever and you will be happier than society had ever made you believe was possible until now.