Lost
When a person claims to be “lost” in a semi-permanent fashion, listeners often register “lost” to mean something like “having no direction in life” and may either empathize in some impossibly general sense or write off the feeling as a fictitious state that the person only believes himself to be in because of overly romantic (and naïve) notions of life. One might respond with, “Life is never as cohesive or comprehensible as you think it should be,” and suggest to this “lost” person that he learn to deal with reality. In either case it is often assumed that “lost” represents a feeling that is both pervasive and hard to describe or pinpoint.
However, there exist people for whom being “lost” is a phenomenon that not only seems to affect the actual happenings of his life but does so in a way easily recognizable by others. If walking through a college campus you see a man standing in one spot and confusedly looking at his surroundings, you would probably call the man “lost”, even if you knew him to be a student at the college with perfect knowledge of the identities of every building within sight. If during a conversation with you a student trying to relate an idea jumps to point to point with halting sentences and without any unifying theme or even any real indication he knows what he is talking about, you would probably call the student “lost”, even if he was talking about himself and answering the simple question, “How are you?” To most of us the similarity between the man’s behavior and the behavior often termed as “lost” would seem coincidental, but to the man this type of behavior may in fact feel representative. For this man the feeling of being alone in an unrecognizable place (feeling lost) may be very similar to the way he feels when going through his everyday life; the feeling of attempting to describe subjects without adequate knowledge of them (feeling lost) may also describe his feeling when he looks at a mirror with his eyes open. Just as the different connotations of the word “lost” have a similar root meaning, so might this man view the easily identifiable periods of feeling “lost” as manifestations of a phenomenon that characterizes his entire life. Thus he feels “lost” when he forgets his reason for attending college or when he can’t remember the names of his friends. Thus he sometimes sits alone in the dining hall, he is unable to make sense of the news, and he doesn’t get his homework done. Thus he frequently writes observations about himself without meaningful analysis or concluding…
However, there exist people for whom being “lost” is a phenomenon that not only seems to affect the actual happenings of his life but does so in a way easily recognizable by others. If walking through a college campus you see a man standing in one spot and confusedly looking at his surroundings, you would probably call the man “lost”, even if you knew him to be a student at the college with perfect knowledge of the identities of every building within sight. If during a conversation with you a student trying to relate an idea jumps to point to point with halting sentences and without any unifying theme or even any real indication he knows what he is talking about, you would probably call the student “lost”, even if he was talking about himself and answering the simple question, “How are you?” To most of us the similarity between the man’s behavior and the behavior often termed as “lost” would seem coincidental, but to the man this type of behavior may in fact feel representative. For this man the feeling of being alone in an unrecognizable place (feeling lost) may be very similar to the way he feels when going through his everyday life; the feeling of attempting to describe subjects without adequate knowledge of them (feeling lost) may also describe his feeling when he looks at a mirror with his eyes open. Just as the different connotations of the word “lost” have a similar root meaning, so might this man view the easily identifiable periods of feeling “lost” as manifestations of a phenomenon that characterizes his entire life. Thus he feels “lost” when he forgets his reason for attending college or when he can’t remember the names of his friends. Thus he sometimes sits alone in the dining hall, he is unable to make sense of the news, and he doesn’t get his homework done. Thus he frequently writes observations about himself without meaningful analysis or concluding…