There are few places in this world more judgmental than the school gate. So it was with some horror that I watched our eight-year-old excitedly recount a grand parenting disaster in front of a mother I had only just met. We were in the delicate business of arranging a first playdate when our youngest suggested we could take her new friend on an adventure – “like that time we got lost for hours in the bush, waded through the river, ended up having to climb that steep cliff and got chased by wasps”.
I smiled apologetically. The mother smiled nervously and suggested she act as chaperone for the playdate.
It was only afterwards that I realised my daughter had meant to praise, not humiliate me. As a school holiday activity, that riverside afternoon had felt like a grand parenting failure. I had been less intrepid Indiana Jones and more disastrous dad from the Berenstain Bears. While clambering thirsty and bleeding up a crumbling, sandy cliff with two young children – shortly before we stumbled on that wasp nest – I had visions of how our doomed expedition might be reported in the media the following day.
And yet, 18 months on, this trauma had become a treasured memory for our kids. More than an amusing anecdote, getting lost in the not-very-wilds of our local suburb had delivered what I had glibly promised – an adventure.
Getting lost is no easy matter in an age where we tend to carry the world in our pockets. But Siri’s gently chiding instructions were no help when mired in a bamboo thicket or getting snagged while crawling through a fig tree.
I had been inspired, in part, by Tom Hodgkinson’s The Idle Parent – the best (possibly only) guide to parenting I have bothered to read. Hodgkinson is opposed to the sort of formalised education and play we tend to foist on our kids and advises parents to take children “to the wildest and most shop-free spaces they can find”. It seemed a cheap school holiday option.
The plan (I use the term loosely) had been to leave the path and see how far we could make it through a scruffy stretch of green between cliff face and river. For the kids, it had been an exercise in unpredictability. What treasures might await?
Along our winding way, we found a graveyard for shopping trolleys, abandoned rope swings, fossilised roots, an overgrown spring and a mysterious gate in a forbidding wall. The best part of it, for the kids, was venturing into the unknown, with no clear idea of where we would end up. They didn’t mind that it took us three hours to get nowhere in particular and, having rediscovered civilisation, just five minutes to walk back to the car.
Adults can also benefit from not knowing where they are going. My most memorable experiences involve getting lost, usually while travelling or tipsy (or both). There are parts of London I would never have discovered if I’d been better at reading my A to Z. There are parts of San Francisco I would have avoided if I’d been able to access Google on the go. There are friends I would never have made if I hadn’t got on the wrong bus, train or tram. Getting lost forces us to pay fierce and rewarding attention to our surroundings, while trusting in GPS encourages us to blindly drive into a lake.
To allow yourself to get lost – which now tends to be a conscious decision, rather than a happy accident – is to open yourself up to possibility. One possibility, of course, is that you are about to put yourself in danger in a foreign city. We’ve all been there (or somewhere kind of near it). But it also feels like an act of defiance in our information age, a refusal to be led by algorithm or Google review.
Every recommendation – even those of our close friends – tends to be an extension of what we already know or like. Shunning good advice and getting lost (even close to home) is a chance to not only chart new territory but to discover an unknown part of ourselves.
Getting lost doesn’t have to involve stumbling into danger, of course. Usually the only risk in leaving our comfort zone is abandoning the illusion – made so convincing in our digital age – that we can (or should) control every aspect of our lives. Admittedly, this is where the tipsiness can help those of us whose inhibitions have us in a stranglehold. There is a certain point of a night out where, with a small amount of liquid encouragement, it seems suddenly possible to find yourself in a karaoke bar or crashing an Irish wedding party. These have been some of the best nights of my life.
As I grow older, I find booze has become less necessary to get away from myself. Instead I try to bottle some of that enthusiasm from the times I had no idea where I was going and, soberly, remember the joy that often results from embracing the unknown. At heart, it’s about play – the sort of unpredictable and unstructured play we know children thrive upon.
One of Hodgkinson’s arguments – along with an appealing antipathy for Saturday sports – is that Bad Parents are Good Parents. To be a good parent is to invest in education and extracurricular activities that will, we hope, allow our offspring to succeed. The result is often a childhood that is extensively scheduled – particularly when both parents are likely to be working. For me, that lost afternoon was a reminder that sometimes the best thing we can do for our kids is to plan absolutely nothing. And then get lost.
• Myke Bartlett is a writer and critic
