This week had some incredibly strong and sharp themes about reciprocity and trust, as well as an inquiry that came both in person and via text.
I am lost.
What do I do?
There are so many ways to be lost, I’m afraid.
Oleta, the dental hygienist I have seen since 1999, used to have a poster on the ceiling above the chair with a list titled “Everything You Need To Know You Already Learned in Kindergarten.” For this reason, it may be the text I’ve read more often than any other - I visit the dentist 4+ times a year and it takes me only 90 seconds to get through the whole thing. So I’ve read it thousands and thousands of times. It’s got some simple ideas and a few that ring profound:
Wash your hands. Say thank you. Clean up your own mess.
When I don’t know how to answer a question that pops into my phone, I mentally thumb the archives.
If you’ve been reading along for any length of time (thank you!), you know that my experience of kindergarten was particularly bizarre as it started the year I was four with a long-haired man who had spent some time in India named Greg. He taught us yoga, as it was taught to him in the 70’s, with some stretching out in the ankle-deep crab grass and little dib dabs of the Bhagavad Gita. When not yoga-ing, we each rocketed through individually-paced math and reading curriculum and collaborated on the necessary structural repairs on the grounds surrounding us. I have a distinct memory of rebuilding a bridge across the creek that year, proudly wearing my flip flops seeking large(ish) rocks, mindful of crawdads which were - at the time - the size of my feet.
While these items feel remarkably practical and surely prove the ceiling-poster mantra true, I’ve heard that the skills I learned in kindergarten are remarkably different from the skills my peers in the neighborhood learned, which included proctored socialization and something called “sight words” where one is instructed to just recognize and match clusters of letters with likely words rather than learning the architecture and nuance and rules with which to sound things out. Perhaps each of us learned in grade school the sorts of things we would individually need, mine simply incorporated the eighth incarnation of Vishnu in a battlefield and a dab of structural engineering.
The rote answer I recall to ‘what to do when you’re lost’ from orienteering and wilderness preparation a few years later in 1989 was to hug a tree.
Annually, the “older kids” or third through sixth graders would spend a week at Sky Ranch, about an hour west of town in the mountains. As I recall, it was a Lutheran bible camp, although we used it in the off-season, spoke none of Jesus (although there was a sizable carving referencing two or more gathered in my name), and studied battlefield tactics and survival strategies under the adorable guise of capture-the-flag. It was there I met a mountain man who lived off the grid, learned that it was absolutely logistically possible to just pee in the woods, and how to orient based on earth-bound landmarks and celestial maps.
The year before my first sojourn to the camp, a fellow in the class ahead of me had wandered out of bounds and become lost for a period of hours, which prompted additional briefings, including shelter construction, how to make a face-sized hole in a black plastic trash bag so that one could occupy it for the night and stay warmer and drier. The most salient lesson came with a lot of emphatic eye contact and the line IF YOU ARE LOST STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT GET MORE LOST. MORE LOST IS VERY BAD. HUG A TREE.
(it’s on the poster).
The gift of being lost is the awareness that you don’t know where you are. You’re in over your head. You’re not getting your needs met.
In orienteering, you are instructed to stop where you are and meet your emotional needs with the embrace of a tree. Then, you are to craft some sort of signal to those who might find you by tying something bright in a more visible space or making a large X of fallen branches in a clearing for a potential helicopter.
Then hunker, make a hole in a plastic bag, and pray.
(this line is nowhere on the poster).
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