You Have to Get lost to Find Yourself

I remember being two or three years old. I was sat on the edge of the bed one evening readying myself to listen in to my mum reading a story to me and my older sister, as I often liked to do.

There was a glass of milk on the floor. I began reaching for it. It was a manoeuvre that I had performed many times, but I was unaware of the force of a spring-loaded mattress and the risk that it brought to a tentatively balanced toddler.

Just as I leaned over the edge, my mum sat herself on the bed. I was catapulted off. The helpless descent is the part that I remember most clearly. Almost in slow motion, I fell towards the floor, arm outstretched, but bearings completely lost. My face crashed against the glass; the impact hitting just beneath my eye socket. With the book unopened, and blood pouring from my face, I was rushed into hospital.

I loved books and stories when I was young. Many of my earliest memories include experiences with books. At two years old, I remember curiously turning pages of encyclopaedias to seek out illustrations of leaves and animals. At three years old, I had outgrown the books in the classroom of my playgroup, and the teacher would fetch me books from the older year groups’ class.

At four or five years old, I had stopped reading. My stepfather at the time had introduced me to football and this made me much more of a ‘man’ in his eyes. I had also followed in his footsteps and began playing computer games and escaping from the real world.

From what I can make out of this man, based upon my mothers stories and my own fragmented childhood memories, he felt somewhat intimidated by my intellect, frequently calling me ‘stupid’ and ‘idiot’ when I couldn’t perform certain tasks, and he certainly projected his own shame upon me when I expressed the most innocent and sensitive parts of myself.

I spent many years running away from this version of myself as a result of the abuse that I received. Until recently that is, when I turned myself around and ran outdoors in pursuit of him.

My journey ‘back’ began almost six years ago. I was feeling lost and alone in this world, and to understand my confusion, I decided that I would go out into the wilderness and lose myself even further. In losing ‘myself’, so began the journey to find my ‘Self’.

In the silence of Nature, we hear our deepest callings. These are the callings of our soul. It began, for me, as a quiet whisper that summoned me outside to a nearby waterfall. Now it is that the voice screams and the deep Welsh baritone sings to me through the trees. It is too loud to ever ignore.

In Greek mythology, Odysseus hears the voice of Zeus through the rustling of leaves on a tree. In the bible, Moses must go out into the darkness to hear God talking to him through the burning bush, and again to receive the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai. In Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became The Buddha after meditating underneath a Bodhi tree for forty days.

Nature is the common theme throughout all of myth and religion, as is solitude. There is no truth quite like your own in this existence, and it takes for us to retreat into the wilderness and find solitude if we are to hear our own personal truth.

Truth needs time, space and stillness to formulate, and how can it possibly formulate inside of us if we are constantly distracted by the noise and stimuli of this increasingly busy, modern world? How can we strip back the masks to see our true selves if we are constantly forcing ourselves to be something that we are not in order to fit into the place that we have been told that we belong by society?

This life, from my experience, is as much about unlearning as it is about learning; unbecoming as it is about becoming. When I look back at my own life, I can see that I was born whole, innocent and pure. The conditioning that I received from my father figures, and then furthermore by society as I grew older, is what stripped me of my purity and innocence – my own ‘soul’ so to speak.

I felt lost and listless for many years, particularly throughout my teens and early adulthood. Although I had found my place within society by the age of 26 – a stable job, consistent monthly income, a company car, and a level of respect from the people around me – I was empty and soulless.

This place of safety and security that I was in had left me feeling more lost and alone than I ever had been before. Thankfully, I listened to that whisper, and followed the path to the waterfall back in the summer of 2018; a walk that marked the beginning of the greatest journey a human could ever embark on; the journey inwards.

When I am outdoors in nature, and I am lost in the literal sense – all alone on a path that is unfamiliar to me and unsure of what way to turn next – I feel like that pure and innocent version of myself once again; so full of curiosity and wonder for what might be waiting around the next corner.

I have discovered many truths within myself along unknown footpaths since that day back at the waterfall, and I have added many new pieces to my ever-growing puzzle.

It is said that, ‘no man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man’. The longer that I spend outdoors in nature, the more that I forget who I was – or, perhaps, it is that I am finally remembering who I am.