Today I took a little hike through Mt. Misery State Park in Lincoln Massachusetts. It was partially a research mission. I wanted to see how long it would take me to get lost and then found again on the other side of the mountain. But I failed at both. I started out on this trail that I thought was taking me deeper and deeper into the
woods.

And after a while, anxiety would set in. I wondered if maybe I should be getting worried because I am really going very deep and the trees are so tall, so much taller than me… and dense and I am all by myself and I don’t know very many people in Massachusetts and now it’s getting darker and the bugs are starting to bite. But then I noticed that I was passing the same elderly couple I passed by 10 minutes earlier, at the same tree trunk, with the same dogs bounding about. And then I noticed I had
somehow made my way back to my car. I can’t tell you how frustrating that was. Then I’d try it again, taking a different path, going even deeper, and the exact same thing happened.  I guess getting loss requires non-effort and I was just not trying hard enough to not try. That is the lesson of Mt. Misery.

Actually it has some parallels to a story my friend B told me about Houdini the other day. She said that Harry Houdini couldn’t get out of this jail cell he’d picked the lock of many times before. It turned out it wasn’t locked in the first place so every time he tried to unlock it, he was actually locking it again.

Maybe that is what inspired my journey.