"And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me." - Robert Frost in "Directive"

Recently, there has been one word stuck to my mind and consciousness, amidst a quick vacation and trip home, amidst long, half-day drives across the east coast. Highway hypnosis has been inflicted upon me. I have allowed myself to be mindless in my long trips in the car, in meeting people I never expected to meet in my conventional, day to day life.

I've been meeting with friends that I haven't seen in years, friends I've lost touch with largely that part of me felt like I've never seen again. They're the friends in high school that you mutually say"let's keep in touch", only to forget about a year later. And no one can blame you, because both of you moved on to new lives. I had two tenants who ventured up to drive four hours to help my brother move in to school, with no expectation that I was going to make the drive to upstate New York. I drove 8 whole hours with complete strangers, and we talked about random things, from my family to their experiences growing up in India to everything far and in between.

The past few days have felt to me, like a dream. If there's any word to describe the emotion, it's lost.

And lost has a bad connotation in our hustle culture and today's day and age. To be lost on a drive or commute means that you're later than intended to where work or wherever you need to go. To be lost in the woods means that you're far, at least mentally and spiritually, from being home. To be lost in your faith means to not have any direction, to just float and let yourself go to where the forces that naturally drift you to where you need to go.

The premise of my Christian faith is that you have to be lost before you can be found. You have to be spiritually dead to be alive. Each sensation, phenomenon, or emotion is relative, as we have to know deep sorrow and depression to find joy.

I have been lost in the past couple days, traversing a world and a place that I've been out of touch with. The truth is, in this place, seeing some of my family at home for the first time in a while, I don't know anything. I feel like I have very little control over most things.

Strangely, I feel at peace with that. Not having control over this weekend, and just letting myself let go, is perhaps what a vacation is supposed to be like. I have always struggled with vacation. I am the foremost of victims of hustle culture: any time that's not productive is deemed a waste of time, even though I know that perception is wrong.

The drama Lost, depicts a group of people involved in a plane crash and then being forced to live together on a mysterious island in the South Pacific Ocean. Far from home, these people and characters crave going home to their past lives. But over the course of the show, being lost becomes a much more comfortable sensation. And then being lost in that island becomes their home, and for the main characters, being back on the island is where they're truly at home, and found.

Being lost and that island may have been symbolic for being in a purgatory-like place that may be hell. But I don't reach for allegory in popular culture TV shows, because that cheapens the gospel and the show.

Lost teaches us that the best things in life are often accidents, that truly being awake and alive come when we're not expecting them to come. I didn't intend to find God, and I resisted my call to faith for the first 20 years of my life.

An awakening a revelation, rousing from being asleep or a period of activity or indifference. Whatever ways we perceive ourselves to change, whatever ways that some passion in us or zeal for a cause comes into our lives is not how we change: it's an awakening of something that was already there. The bear finally wakes up from hibernation.

The analogy is, for many, a comparison to a religious awakening or faith. But it's so much more universal than that: to be lost means to be found. To be dead inside means you have to eventually be alive. It felt weird in the moment to be at home finally and hang out with friends I hadn't seen in a while, to see how life had changed for my brother and my mom. Every part of my routine was broken on my trip home.

I'm back in Baltimore now with fresh eyes, like I just woke up from a dream. I wish it were a dream, because the number in my bank account and weight of my wallet are noticeably lower after a night out with my friends in New York City. My friends at home aren't the most fiscally responsible, and I give in easily to peer pressure. Some day, I'll probably write an article titled "The Art of Balling Out," because I know that when you're broke, and you make it, you're probably the person at the bar buying everybody drinks, and paying for everyone's meal. The first dinner after a two-week paycheck was how my friends decided to go at it, and that was perhaps the best course of action. I don't know when I'll see them again, and it was an experience I wouldn't trade away.

Life is what happens in these in-between moments of lost-ness, and happiness and joy come from these moments, too. Joy comes from the moments in life you didn't plan, because often, happiness as an emotion comes when your experience of reality transcends your expectations. When you plan things to every minute detail, your expectations for that moment also rise.

At the core, that means we're not always supposed to be happy. We wouldn't get anywhere if we were, because to serve and to grow mean to suffer and struggle. Joy, however, is a phenomenon that far transcends happiness. C.S. Lewis once differentiated joy from happiness as an experience that anyone would exchange for all the pleasures in the world. This weekend, going home, was one of those moments where I think I found a little bit of it.

I don't find joy all the time, but when I do, it's usually from being lost, and stumbling upon something that, yes, I wouldn't trade for all the pleasures in the world.