When I was a child in Chicago, “don’t get lost” was imprinted deeply in my consciousness. There were always stories of children getting lost and coming to unhappy ends. After playing football late in a darkening afternoon, nothing looked better than the warm lights of home through the cold twilight.
Then getting lost grew exciting. The bicycle was a liberating vehicle, letting me explore the city. To find yourself in a neighborhood you didn’t know, then getting home, was an adrenalin rush that hooked me on challenge and adventure.
Great literature often tells of lost people finding their way home. The journey of Odysseus is an archetype of the heroic journey which mythologists tell us is part of every culture. We must all become heroes in our own journeys and connect our biographies to universal myths.
A couple thousand years ago, the metaphor of lost and found became a metaphor of a spiritual journey in search of wholeness. Exile and return, wilderness and homecoming. Stories of lost sheep, lost coins, lost people being found — a way of talking about the experience of our own wholeness.
Lost is a way of saying we’re in transition. Fragmented. Muddled.
Found is the opposite — “getting it together,” being connected. The absence of dissonance we call “peace.”
But today, thanks to Global Positioning System satellites, intelligent transportation systems, and panoptic data bases, we can’t get lost.
How will this affect those deep emotional truths? We’ll live as they do in villages. We’ll hide more of our real selves. The metaphors won’t be lost but will be rewritten. Artists and prophets will invent new images of “lost and found,” disclosing new landscapes of outer and inner space. Trans-planetary civilization will shrink space like pulling a drawstring. Living digitally will generate new ways of thinking about the maze, the levels of the programs of our lives, and nested recursive structures that all come together in elegant code, their complexity and simplicity stunning, a box in a box in a box.
