Lost Is Just a Four Letter Word
“Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves” – Henry David Thoreau
Havana is an eclectic, neurotic city of more than two million people, pulsing with multi layered rhythms, colors, moods, and energy. It’s been called an exhausting nightmare, sublimely tawdry, and the most romantic city in the world while all possibly being true simultaneously. Winston Churchill called Havana “a place where anything can happen” and on that count, it rarely failed to disappoint. This little slice of Caribbean chaos can be just about anything except boring.
As a casual visitor, you might be led to places like Revolution Square and other obsequious homages to Castro, Guevara, and Marti. Finca La Vigía, an estate set high along the city’s perimeter, is where Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960. Then of course there’s La Habana Vieja – The Old City – with its colorfully-painted paladares, festive open-air cantinas, and gaggles of sunburnt Canadian tourists wearily shuffling through the cobbled alleys.
I’m not one to complain about tourists while pretending I’m not actually one of them myself, so for two days I dutifully imbibed the scene’s contrived nostalgia with the same combination of enthusiasm and irony that I applied to its famously overrated mojitos. Yet I was gaining a thirst for something more than just the same tired tourist circuit. Authentic and gritty is what I sought, a furtive peek behind the superficial facade. I wanted to experience, if only for a day, “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go,” borrowing a phrase from Simon and Garfunkel’s imperishable The Boxer; the crumbling buildings, the working markets, the suffocating poverty, the real lives of real people. I wished to go native.
On the morning of day three, I flagged down a taxi in front of the hotel, a flaking blue ‘53 Chevy, and set out solo into the heart of the steamy inner city. After forty exhilarating minutes of walking and exploration, I had not the faintest idea where I was or how I had gotten there. I was lost.
“No Left Turn Unstoned” Lost in the heart of Havana or just contrived nostalgia? Canon EOS R Mirrorless camera with Canon RF 24-105mm f/4L is USM Lens @ 42mm. 1/500 second @ f/8, ISO 1000.
Being lost is often cited as one the four most crippling human fears. And while technological progress has made little headway with death, heights, and public speaking, it has nearly succeeded in reducing the art of getting lost into a lost art. GPS devices, smart phones, and navigation apps with talking virtual assistants can get us from Point A to Point B with ruthless efficiency while offering little about where we are in the world, figuratively speaking.
According to cognitive scientists, getting lost is an essential part of how we grow and develop as humans. Whether it’s in a big, sprawling city like Havana, a forest, or a good book or movie, losing oneself, even for the briefest of moments, is good for the mind and the soul. Aside from the state of being lost, there’s the added benefit of getting unlost at some point, a practice that draws on exercising one’s intuition, reasoning skills, and memory recall. Making mental maps and establishing spatial awareness using landmarks and physical cues – instead of relying solely on technology’s cold, clinical instructions – are important cognitive functions that are quickly becoming lost, for lack of a better word, in today’s digital age.
Having spent much of my childhood in the foothills of rural North Carolina, I was given an extraordinary amount of freedom as a young boy to get lost at will, which I often happily did. A typical journey began on a bicycle, continued on foot through unfamiliar tracts of woods, fields, and dusty dirt roads until I became lost, or at least unsure of my location. I would then instinctively seek out the most familiar feature of the local landscape, the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains at Roaring Gap. I knew this piece of splendid scenery like the back of my hand and it was my navigational and emotional North Star. With this guidepost in sight, I could calibrate my bearings with respect to east, west, north and south and the direction that would take me from the Land of the Lost back home to Possum Trot.
The fear probably has very little to do with the condition of actually being lost, which is pretty harmless itself, but rather the psychologically unsettling disconnection from the familiar and the consequences that can arise from it. In a wilderness situation, it would certainly be irresponsible not to carry a GPS device, if only for an emergency, but just as irresponsible if it became a preoccupation and distraction from what was most important – the experience. In an urban environment, the fear is focused on being harmed in some way by another person; a stranger. But if you’re ever the unfortunate victim of assault or physical violence, the statistics point to overwhelming odds that you will know your attacker personally, probably intimately. Strangers are regularly disparaged in the abstract, but the kindness and generosity offered as individuals have saved me from more than just a few moronic decisions while traveling. By averting our gazes to the flickering screens of our phones and tablets while avoiding interaction with others, we only miss out on much of life’s rich banquet. And do we really want these devices raising an entire generation of young men who grow up never knowing what it’s like to refuse to ask for directions?
And what exactly is lost anyway? Well for starters, it’s both relative and subjective. Everyone and everything are always somewhere since nowhere doesn’t exist as a real place. If you’ve ever lost your car keys or the TV remote, they are only lost to you. If the remote could talk and was asked to comment on your little crisis, it would have to admit that being lost wasn’t all that bad, thankyouverymuch. Being lost can be a place of cosmic bliss and a buzz of creative inspiration for us humans too, if we’d only give it a chance. For others, however, lost is an unhappy place of doubt and uncertainty and might very well be Dante’s forgotten tenth circle of hell. The mild epithet, “Get Lost” is a G-rated simulacrum of the vulgar, three-word directive with the aforementioned four-letter destination. Maybe hell, after all, is an eternity spent wandering the vast, empty corners of the universe, helplessly and hopelessly lost. And maybe some of us actually find comfort in that notion and a glimmer of bliss too. After all, it’s possible that hell can be one person’s bliss just as bliss can exist as another soul’s personal hell. And lost? It’s just a four-letter word. It’s all about how you look at it.
HAVANA, CUBA – SEPTEMBER 2018
This is brilliant, entertaining, funny, and thoughtful. I love your work, Mr. Bernabe. I’ve always said you are every bit as good a writer as a photographer. Your talent simply awes me.
I can get “lost” in your writing! Brilliant.
Right? looks like Richard is more than a photographer!!
Great stuff, Rich. Great writing!
Great photograph and great writing! Thanks for sharing this thought provoking and funny story with us.
What a journey! Your photos and stories take me to places I could only dream of. Please continue to share it with us. Thanks so much
I believe and I am sure that the young people of today do not know and will never know what it is to “let themselves be lost”. A childhood like yours is essential for the psychological formation of the human being. Technology is very important, but the essential is invisible to the eye.
Beautiful and enthralling your message. I always admired you! Congratulations!!!
Brilliant, witty and engaging to the end.
Great photography and thanks for sharing such a nice story with us .
Good job keep up the work .
Thanks for sharing.
I got “lost” in your words.
“And do we really want these devices raising an entire generation of young men who grow up never knowing what it’s like to refuse to ask for directions?”- No!! – We must ALWAYS ask for direction – Jesus knew we’d be lost without Him. Besides… the fun part of being lost (in that moment of the unknown …of whether or not you will be found or find for yourself) is a blast of excitement!! – This excitement cannot be replaced… Not by a known answer immediately but rather later.. when relief does come. – To be found is truly a gift …and one should never take that gift for granted! I love your gift of words and storytelling- we always learn from you Richard Bernabe! Keep inspiring as you do.. You lift us up to keep pushing for excellence.. you do! Thank you for that and for your dedication to teaching us…not to accept less!
It is very easy to get “lost” in your writings and your photography.Both are uplifting and spiritual, good for my sou, feeling I should get “lost” somewhere.Thanks for sharing.
I love getting lost and taking photos. I think it might be the best part of being a photographer!
Some of my favorite photos come out when I am on the road and I end up stopping and getting “lost” in an area or small unfamiliar town. Thank you for your article
Wow, you’ve become quite the whimsical writer, this article is quite a thoughtful tale.
The most lost I’ve been was as a young lieutenant in the middle of a blacked out Army position in a deep dark cold snowed in German forest unable to relocate my tent (flash lights weren’t allowed). After stumbling about at some point I just stopped and took it all in. Not the worst feeling.
I taught both my sons how to read a tropo map and move with only it and a compass, I doubt there are few today that can do that. Siri and Alexa may not always be available to guide us.
I was once lost but now I am found, was blind but now I see..
Amazing Grace
That is my lost and found.
I have loved your photos for years now, and could always relate to many of your blogs of past, we were doing different remote travels and achieving different goals, but the prep and finding oneself in a vast wilderness was a relatable experience with your blogs., and I guess that is what continues the interest in your work.
Being lost as you have written is much like you write, it stirs real emotion, sometimes fear and that fear needs to be faced and overcome to regain the peace that being lost strives to rob you of.
I am a literal person, a literal hell and a literal heaven..being lost on earth is a challenge if it happens it can be rewarding and empowering to come out of it, but being lost eternally is serious subject and no matter how famous, rich, smart, skilled we are in this world, we do not want to be lost to the eternal life.
God Bless your adventures and your skill, I pray you know, or seek and find the one and only “real” gps to eternal life where you will never be lost. I am not going to ask that you forgive me for such a serious comment because it is the ultimate love that shares truth and wants no one to be lost.
I am out on a limb and oh well, if not I then who?
Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life no man comes to the Father but by Him. This is a “lost” that no one will want.
ok, here goes the press of the return button, God’s Speed, His purpose
Your mention of “lost” in Havana brough back memories of “strolls” in both Havana and Trinidad, just going along a road and turning left or right at random until we had no idea exactly where we were but were comfortable enough in knowing we were not too far from anywhere. We had the best experiences with the people and got good shots and soon stumbled back into the central areas. I agree that most of the time you are safe getting lost but do worry that people relying on modern technology somehow disengage their natural perception of where they are.
Great writing and brilliant photograph. Loved it.
Yes, you are rights, sometimes is good to get lost, being out of my confort zone always made me take better photos
You are not just a great photographer but an amazing writer, it was a pleasure to read this article, and yes, let get lost!
I love what other folks call “being lost”. I know I’m never, really, am. Quite a few years ago I journied cross country alone. The only thing I knew was that, being on the East coast, all I had to do was follow the setting sun. No GPS, no itinerary, no agenda. I didn’t know, exactly, where I was going. I didn’t know if I would be returning to the East coast (home-base) or not. Three and a half months exploring, meeting some very fine folks, being amazed, finally swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Everytime I think, talk, or write about this I’m taken back; and, the best gift I ever gave myself is given again.
Thank you, Richard, for sharing your gifts of photography and writing in this; and, so much more.
Cheers!
~Jessan