lie no. 16 | 05.06.19

What started as a misguided social experiment ended up changing the way I see the world, in turn, changing everything. And I’m ready to tell about it.

Six months to the day after I published the first installment of Lies—while wandering Amsterdam’s concentric canals—I no longer felt lost.

We’re taught that all mazes—chockablock with dead ends and wrong turns—are these solvable (winnable even!) sets of twists and turns. All we have to do is know where to go when, and if we don’t, we can always correct course.

Hit a dead end? Don’t fret: Turn back and try again! Make a wrong turn? Fear not: Two wrongs may not make a right, but *three rights* will put you back where you started!

None of that ever felt right to me. I’d rather not win a race to the end.

It took Amsterdam—via San Miguel de Allende, Hong Kong and everywhere else I’ve traveled leading up to this point in my life—to remind me that when we look around and pay attention—and I mean ✨really✨ pay attention—we’re never actually lost in the labyrinth of life.

Even when we find ourselves in uncharted territory, all we have to do is look around. If we look, and we’re lucky, we will see something we recognize, something familiar, in all of the faces, places and spaces forming the concentric circles of our lives. There’s enormous comfort in that.

It only took a hurricane, three continents, a wisdom path, shaman, Van Gogh’s letters and a whole lot of bird shit to get me here. Or did it?