For those compelled to explore, there are many ways to get lost. I should know. At thirteen, lost in lush coastal rainforest with a cousin of twelve, I had to take the lead when he freaked out about leeches. Luckily I got us back to our holiday house intact. Or two decades later, on a Tassie wilderness trek, when my twenty-something partner and I couldn’t connect our map to the territory. He threw a tantrum too and abused me. Many years after that, a therapist friend and I went astray in dense scrub, to eventually emerge unscathed. But our friendship never recovered.

Each of those companions dumped their panic on me: predictable from an errant adolescent or a grown-up spoilt middle-class boy; unexpected from a sixty-something therapist. Why lose your wits and sense of humour as well as your way? Not that I made light of our plight. Misplacing keys triggers drama for me, but I tend to meet real crises calmly. And in each case, the other person’s rage looked like a defence against terror.

This feature (or bug) of our species, the drive to catastrophise, thrives online. Hissy fits go viral, upstaging common sense, unless it counters the dominant narrative with enough power that Big Tech seeks to block it or bury it too deep for a search to unearth. The thing is, common sense can give us independence, while frantic antics scream victim status. Yet they also produce an illusion of aliveness, repress awareness of the fact that folk who go missing don’t always survive.

Yet none of us needs to get lost anymore, in our thoroughly mapped modern world. Our handheld surveillance units phones provide Google Maps and other apps to show us where we are 24/7 so we can tell all our virtual friends. We’ve been sold the illusion of safety through never losing track of our location as if it’s for our benefit when, instead, anyone who slips through the net is a lost opportunity. The more we share who and where we are, what we’ve done, are doing, or want to do, the more potential profit we represent. So while we manage our preferences, our keepers manage us. And this vastly underestimated overreach is killing our culture. Killing imagination, originality, independence, and any individual creativity that political correctness hasn’t suppressed.

At thirteen, my partner learned to play guitar from library books, watching session musos try guitars in stores, and exploring the fretboard of a hand-me-down guitar in the dark. Wholly self-taught, he evolved his own technique. But today, anyone can teach themselves to play any lick or riff at all with relative ease from an endless parade of YouTube tutorials: not a way to discover anything new. So, inept or adept, they all sound the same. My partner’s singular style has impressed many trained professionals.

Of course, not all exploration occurs in outer terrain. And unless we leave the beaten track – in thought, not just action – to risk the unknown, we can never live fully or create much of real worth as artists or earthlings. Yet our culture dreads death: the ultimate unknown. We’ve disowned religion because it honours mystery, dismissed God/gods (symbols of the unknowable), and exalted science with its false promise to nix all unidentified phenomena.

Ironic, then, that science is increasingly failing to deliver any semblance of protection against all the supposedly growing threats to human life on our planet – microbes that meet the attack of antibiotics or faux-vaccines as a challenge, and what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger, because they’re a lot like us. In fact, science is finding they ARE us – a huge proportion of our DNA is microbial. Which puts us in a double bind. Our high priests toxify and destroy our environment, then explain why we’re sick and/or dying, and offer cures (with side effects). What if the cure entailed dropping off the radar?

Some years ago, when my current partner and I got lost in the bush, he stayed calm (unlike former fellow travellers). So the challenge brought us closer, and together we found the path. And then, a few weeks ago on the south coast, it happened again. One sunset, we went wandering, not knowing where we were going. If we hadn’t seen a sign with a map showing local walking tracks, we might have just stuck to the road. But we struck out through bush full of wild life and heady scents, saw a pale green slug with a red triangle on its back, heard a roo and lots of birds, gazed over the ocean from a high ledge. Unlike on the map, though, the trail dispersed into a maze, and as dusk deepened to dark, we realised we were lost. Cool: I felt ripe for adventure. But my partner sounded unimpressed, so I kept my elation to myself.

Sorry for his stress, I asked him what he wanted to do – maybe he’d chill if he could call the shots? ‘I want to get out of here!’ he said. Of course. (Not that I could relate; we were in the loveliest place we’d been for ages.) No, I said, what did he want to do practically. He didn’t know. Well, no: children don’t and that was where he’d gone. And maybe I’d age-regressed too? The bush was my favourite childhood place, on foot or on horseback. And right now, I didn’t feel cold, tired, hungry or thirsty, not yet. Just euphoric.

Before long, he unwound and we decided to backtrack to a conference centre we’d found in the last half hour while traipsing around. At least we knew which path we’d taken. And sure enough, it soon loomed ahead, a harsh beacon in the soft dark. We entered the huge, deserted grounds. And then we just followed the road that ran through it, beside which stood signs that displayed the same map. No doubt that would point the way out – to a road, any road, that would lead back to our lodgings. But though each map showed us where we were within the bounds of the centre, none contained any reference to the world beyond – no entrance or exit, no hint of a gate, nor even a compass, border or road.

Clichéd horror tropes played through my mind.‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’? Somehow, being lost here felt creepy, unlike being lost in the bush (much as I’d feared the effects of a novel ‘vaccine’ more than a bout of Covid-19). But hey, this is what our species does. We create these insular little worlds – conference centres, theme parks, gated communities, 15-minute cities, international space stations, Western civilisation, massively multiplayer online role-playing games – and inside them loads of codes, rules, laws, lore, values, beliefs and more prevail, making it easy to forget what lies beyond: a vast cosmos, untold dimensions and infinitely diverse life forms (some of which we exclude from our world – exterminate – while exploiting those deemed useful). And we consult our map or official narrative, to be informed: you are here. All the better for us to navigate our prison. Because in the context of the options on offer today across the West, ‘here’ doesn’t signify. Unless you’re content to run through a maze like a lab rat sniffing for pellets.

After my partner and I had gone the wrong way – a long way – due to my misreading the map (which, in its myopia, left lots of scope for interpretation), he googled the conference centre address: not far from our lodgings. Then, since there was only one main road through the grounds, we just reversed direction. Soon we were walking up a regional suburban street; blissfully quiet compared to our coastal city–suburb abode, but dead after the vibrant hum of the bush. That night, despite the strange bed, I slept so well – getting lost had brought me home to myself.