500 Words a Week - The Path of Not Here

The experience of getting lost.

The below is from the Tim Ferris podcast episode with Martha Beck, in which they talk about their mutual friend Boyd Varty. Martha and Boyd are both life coaches, Boyd also runs a Safari.

Martha talks about how she was out trying to track a porcupine with Boyd, they were surrounded by scrub and rocks and Martha struggled to find the next tracks.

Martha gets to a point in which she says:

“I’m completely lost”.

To which Boyd responds:

“No you are never lost, what you are getting is the information that the place you are now and the way you are going isn’t the way you want to end up”.

Martha describes how this is an incredibly important place called the path of not here. And every time you realise that you are in it, you have the option of shifting, of going somewhere else. Without recognizing that this is the path of not here, you can’t shift.

Martha talks about how when she coaches people they are often way into the path of not here. They dislike their job, or other aspects of their life and they’ve just kept going and going, they’ve not woken up to the fact that there were no signs along the way keeping them on this path.

Boyd wrote one of my favourite books “The Lion Trackers Guide to Life”, in which a central premise is that we must remain open to the signs in our life that we experience which bring us joy and energy, which excite us and bring us closer to others. I like the above message as it also reminds us to be aware of times in our life when we aren’t getting any of these signs. When we may feel a little lost.

It’s only by remaining open to that which is going on around us can we identify when there are signs or not. Then if we experience no signs, rather than fretting, rather than worrying we are lost. We understand that we are simply on the path of not here. We can then change our path. We can make alterations in our life to bring back some of these feelings of joy.

Thoughts like this bring forward an important part of what I think aids with a happy life, which is a sense of agency. A sense of having control over our life. Rather than being a piece of driftwood, endlessly floating along wherever the tide may take us, can we be a ship. Carving our own path, our own way forward. As mentioned by Martha and Boyd, while we are carving our own path, can we remain open and attuned to the signs life is giving us. To understanding what motivates us, what brings us joy and energy.