A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with a map, with strangers’ contradictory anecdotal evidence. … Times when some architectural detail or vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. Stories that make the familiar strange again… Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forgot until I realize they have colored everything I felt and did that day. Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 13