You should have seen the look on my husband’s face when I stuck my thumb in the air in Southern Italy.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Hitchhiking!” I said, feigning confidence. He was shocked into silence. But to our surprise, the first car that passed slowed to a stop. Someone inside cracked a window and I said in broken, overly enthusiastic Italian, “I need . . . to go . . . to Matera.” They gestured for us to get in.
We’d visited a popular vantage point outside the city, and now two strangers in a mystery car were taking us back. Their generosity saved us from navigating public transportation, which seemed to exist, but in a mythical sense, since we hadn’t actually seen a bus appear all afternoon. We chatted amiably the whole way, peppering our conversation with whatever fragments of Italian and English seemed to work.
Our driver ventured further into the city than necessary just to leave us at a convenient spot. After we said goodbye my husband and I looked at each other, eyes wide. We’d almost gotten stranded on a desolate road in a foreign country. Then we hitchhiked! And made friends. We were accidentally living the international adventure of our dreams.
Getting lost is not something I do often—I am a person who always has a plan. I make plans for my plans. When traveling I build loose itineraries ahead of time so that once I arrive, I can relax—but still see everything. However appealing it might be to know where I am going and when, I have also come to understand that getting lost is not all bad. In some ways, it’s essential.
Exploring a new city, for example, without a schedule brings a sense of discovery and lived experience that no itinerary can provide. Casually weaving through a set of streets allows you to get acquainted with neighborhoods in the way they were meant to be known—slowly, over time, by devoting your full presence and attention to people and places in front of you—not by looking at a phone.
Stumbling into the best focacceria in a small Italian town becomes more memorable, in my experience, than checking off boxes from some guidebook. You might be overwhelmed by local personalities or confusing lines—by trying to recall Italian vocabulary fast enough for it to be useful. By the woman in charge who remembers after one visit that you always want potato rosemary. Who every morning rattles off some Italian letting you know what time they’ll have more. Who—in her callous way—is happy to see you.
Getting lost makes room in my brain for new connections between seemingly unrelated things, or as psychologists might call it, free association. When those sparks fly, it helps me push my thinking, or conscious brain, aside to make room for all that is unconscious—the part of our mental composition that facilitates processes like creativity, healing, and memory. Creativity, after all, is just another word for free association, or drawing unexpected links. It’s as important to our mental and emotional wellbeing as it is to art.
The good news is that getting lost does not require crossing an ocean. I treasure spacious, meandering days in South Carolina as much as I do in Europe. Their value became clear this spring after I was rejected from a program I hoped would define my next steps and everything to come. As someone who studied opera, of all things, for ten years, someone who entered the job market at the height of the recession, I am cozy with rejection. I understand making it through a selection process requires no small amount of luck.
Still, this time felt different. All signs pointed towards yes, so I spent hours willing the opportunity into being. I was propelled by purpose and direction until one day, over email, my hopes were dashed.
I retreated and asked the usual questions. Why? Where did I go wrong? Right away I started planning my next application.
But then I did something unprecedented: I let myself off the hook.
For two months now I have embraced a new sense of aimlessness, not unlike what I felt in the Italian countryside. Like, What should I do today? kind of aimlessness. Like, Of course I have time to go to the hardware store after lunch. Like telling friends, I puttered around my garden this week.
Maybe I needed this, I realized. Maybe I’m lost. Either way, it’s refreshing.
In a culture that encourages, among other things, checking email 74 times a day—a piece of data from 2014 that has almost certainly multiplied—maybe we could all benefit from more puttering. Sensing this, Germany and France have made it illegal to contact employees on vacation. If anyone emails the staff from one German automaker while they’re out of office, their note will automatically self-destruct.
What if we normalized doing nothing? No guilt or second-guessing. We could give ourselves the cushion to be more human or move at a less frenetic pace.
Here’s what I noticed about my aimless spring. The work that needed to be done still got done. I know what’s coming next and even took some interviews. But I am no longer clawing towards my future. For the first time in my life, I took myself out of the pressure cooker and put my ambition on the counter to cool.
Getting lost—in another country, an antique shop, or the nearby woods—is an invitation to discover something of ourselves along the way. Aimless might be the wrong word, but for me—someone chronically preoccupied with forward motion, making progress, and doing something with my life—it feels just right.
