Quote of the day: “Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself”

The last time I was properly lost, I was standing at a petrol station somewhere north of Chiang Rai with a dead phone, a warm bottle of water and a dog who clearly ran the place. My bus had left without me. I had four hours to wait, nothing to do and no way to tell anyone about it.

It was the calmest I had been in about eighteen months.

Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself.

Yes, it is the sort of line that ends up engraved on a bracelet and screwed to somebody’s kitchen wall. Both of which have happened, it turns out. I went looking for whoever wrote it and found nothing, only evidence that it has been circulating since at least 2014 with no author attached. Anonymous, then. It holds up better than most things sold at a craft market.

Nowhere is mostly an absence of audience

Here is what I think the line is really about. Nowhere has very little to do with distance. It is any situation where nobody knows your job title.

In a city you are surrounded by people who already have a version of you loaded. The neighbour who thinks you are the loud one. The old colleague who still introduces you by the thing you did in 2019. You end up performing that version without noticing, because it is easier than correcting everybody.

Take the audience away and something odd happens. For a day or two you feel faintly useless, because nobody needs anything from you. Then the noise drops. You start hearing your own opinions, which are less impressive and a good deal more honest than the ones you say out loud.

That is the whole mechanism. No mysticism required.

The year my diary went blank

I lost my business, restaurants, during the pandemic. The deal was agreed over a phone call while I sat on a plastic chair in a dining room with the lights off, and it was the least bad option available to me at the time.

For years my day had been decided for me by suppliers, staff rotas and the seven o’clock rush. Then it was not. I woke up on a Tuesday with an empty calendar and genuinely no idea what a Tuesday was for.

I would love to tell you this was peaceful. I reorganised the same cupboard twice. I developed strong opinions about a neighbour’s parking. I rang people I had not spoken to in five years and could hear them wondering what I wanted.

The useful part arrived about three months in, once I had run out of things to tidy. With no restaurant to point at, I had to work out what I would actually do with a day if nobody was paying me for it. The answer was writing, which was inconvenient, as it pays considerably worse than a burger.

You can get lost for the price of a bus ticket

You do not need to sell a business or fly to Patagonia. Nowhere comes in small doses and most of them are free.

Pick a district of your own city you have no reason to visit and spend three hours there on foot. Not a famous one. A dull one, with hardware shops and a wet market and nothing on sale to anyone carrying a suitcase. I do this in Bangkok about once a month and I have never regretted it, though I have frequently regretted the shoes.

Go somewhere your phone cannot help you. Not switched off, just outgunned: the lanes are not on the map and the only language on offer is one you do not speak.

Be a beginner at something in public. Take a class where you are visibly the worst person in the room. It is physically uncomfortable for about twenty minutes. After that it stops mattering, and what is left is quite close to fun.

And if you do travel, leave one day entirely unplanned. No booking, no list, no reservation you have to walk fast to reach. Most people schedule a trip so tightly that they never get further than a warmer version of their normal week.

What actually turns up

Let me manage expectations. You do not come back from a petrol station with a revelation.

What you come back with is a shorter list. Two or three things you thought you cared about turn out to belong to somebody else. One or two things you have never mentioned to anyone are suddenly all you think about when there is nothing else to think about. That is it. It looks like very little on paper. It does not feel that way at thirty-eight, when you are still doing a job you picked at twenty-two to impress someone who stopped watching years ago.

There is a trap in this, though. Some people use the middle of nowhere as somewhere to hide, and the giveaway is that they keep having to go back. If every trip is an escape from the same unaddressed thing at home, the scenery is doing the work of a conversation you have been avoiding. Distance is excellent for seeing a problem clearly. It has never once solved one for me.

The dog at the petrol station, for the record, took no interest in any of this. He sat under the ice cabinet, moved twice in four hours, and had evidently worked something out about Wednesdays that I am still catching up on.