Only the lucky few can abandon themselves to life’s pleasures

“Get lost.” That’s what people used to say to me when I irritated them with one thing or another. “Just! Get! Lost!” 
Sometimes, I may have taken umbrage at the remark. At other times not. I can’t really remember. So many people say so many things. 
But attending a gathering, in her memory, of her friends, following the death of a colleague this week, I found myself, as I looked up at the poster-size picture of her, wishing that I had taken that advice and got lost.
Instead I have spent my life being found. At 55-years-old it was too late for Di to have been lost or found. She is simply not here anymore – thanks to cancer. But she did by all accounts live her life to the hilt. And apparently got lost from time to time.
Instead of being lost, I have spent my life being found. Found hopeless at sport, I turned to writing and literature and was found to be quite good at it. Later I was found to be a good journalist, found to be a reliable employee, found responsible and promoted. I am found by some to be trustworthy as a friend, found to reliable on a cloudy day. 
And it, one day, may well be said of me “he was found to have been OK”.
None of that helps I guess when it comes to the end, when it’s all over.
Which makes me regret in some ways that I never got lost. Had I taken that advice imagine the adventures that I might have enjoyed. Not that I have not had my fair share. I have, but there could have been more.
I have been to the Middle East, Europe, Scandinavia and on the North Sea perched on the shuddering steel platforms of rigs pumping oil from under the seabed to Norway. I have been to North America, the Grand Canyon, New York, Washington and San Francisco and to South America, Sao Paulo, the Amazon, Rio. Closer to home I have been to the Comoros, Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Namibia and Swaziland. And I have been rover, I have walked alone, hiked a hundred highways *but I have never ever been lost.
Once in Venice I ducked down an alleyway and for a while, could not find my way back through the maze of canals. And then there was that time in Athens when I was so excited to be there that I dumped my backpack in a youth hostel headed for the ancient hills, then could, not for the life of me, find my way home.
There were a couple of minutes of sheer panic, then street by street I managed to find my way back, seizing on vague landmarks like handholds on a vertical face. I was too panicked, (my passport, my money, my tickets all in my backpack at the hostel ) to abandon myself, like Socrates, to my fate.
Now days, according to an article in the Cape Times you need technology to get lost. All you have to do, apparently, is be Swedish and type Carpi instead of Capri into your GPS and travel on oblivious. But that not it. Perhaps abandonment, rather than lost is the term I ought to use.
Those who abandon themselves to life, thrilling to the living of it, are those who thrive while those of us who are content to be found standing at the sidelines watching, are voyeurs each one, living our lives vicariously. Why else the crowds drawn to the gladiators, to the bullfights to the rugby, to rock concerts, or staring up at a man on a wire dancing between twin towers a mile high while New York stretches and yawns at dawn.
Is it because we thrive on how they abandon themselves, thrill at how they are totally lost in what they are doing to the exclusion of everything else; abandoned to life itself? Maybe. So then get lost! 


* I have been rover, I have walked alone, and hiked a hundred highways credit Frank Sinatra, Love’s Been Good To Me.”
This column appeared in the Cape Times on 3 August 2009.