Someone said something in our Beautiful Lies virtual living room a few weeks ago that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
We were deep in conversation. The kind that winds and surprises you. Someone dropped a question into the room: if you’re lost in the forest, what do you do?
Most of us answered the same way, without hesitation. You move. You look for landmarks. You try to find higher ground, running water, something familiar. You do something. Because doing something feels better than doing nothing. Because stillness, when you’re scared, feels like surrender.
But here’s what you’re actually supposed to do.
Sit down.
Don’t move. Stay exactly where you are. Because search and rescue can find a stationary target far more easily than a moving one. Every step you take away from where you got lost is another step deeper into the unknown. Your instinct to scramble — to climb, to run, to fix — is the very thing that makes you harder to find.
Interestingly, when lost people in the forest do move, they tend to move in circles.
I sat with that for a moment.
And then I thought: oh. This isn’t just about forests.
How many times have I gotten lost in my own mind and immediately started moving? Spinning. Running through scenarios, making decisions, grasping at the first available answer just to have something solid to hold onto. The panic convinces me that speed is wisdom. That if I just think faster, harder, longer — I’ll find my way out.
But I’m just walking deeper into the trees.
And my mind starts getting stuck in loops.
The mind lost in its own forest looks a lot like that. The impulse is to do more. More thinking. More planning. More action. To climb out as fast as possible. But scrambling only gives you access to whatever is closest. Whatever floats up first. And the first idea, the panicked idea, is rarely the best one.
The wisest thing you can do is sit down.
Meditate. Breathe. Let the mind go quiet enough that the chaos starts to settle. It won’t happen immediately. It never does. At first it just gets louder, like stirring sediment in still water. But if you stay, if you resist the urge to move, something begins to shift.
The sediment settles.
And in that clearing, the one you couldn’t access before because you were too busy stirring things up, things take shape. Solutions you didn’t know existed. Perspectives that weren’t available to the panicked version of you. The path was there all along. You just needed to stop long enough to see it.
Decisions made in a panicked state are never our best ones. We know this. We’ve lived it. And yet the panic is so convincing. So loud and urgent and reasonable-feeling, that we trust it anyway.
What if we didn’t?
What if the next time we felt lost, in our minds or otherwise, we treated it like the forest? What if we sat down, got still, and trusted that the stillness itself was doing something. That in choosing not to run, we were making ourselves findable?
You don’t have to climb out.
You just have to stop moving long enough to be found.
P.S. If you want support finding your way back to stillness, and staying there long enough for the path to emerge, I’d love to walk alongside you through coaching. You can find me here.
