When I was a kid, my parents hired an abrasive and hard-headed French nanny to take care of my sister and me during the days we weren’t in school. We’d walk around Venice beach while she smoked Kools and every time we left the house I’d ask her the same thing.
Come to think of it, I’ve always wanted to get lost. I wanted our walk to become something more than a walk. I wanted to discover treasure and meet strangers that I’d come home to tell stories to my parents about. I’d dart down alleys and she’d play along, humoring this strange American boy, and for a few blocks I’d have convinced myself that we’d done it — that we’d finally slipped the map and that no one on earth knew where we were.
And then we’d round a corner and I’d be faced with the windward circle, or beach boardwalk. And the whole spell would break — thwarted by familiarity!!
We were never lost. We were always exactly where we’d always been.
It wouldn’t be another 20 years before I actually got lost.
On my first afternoon in Tangier, I’d been stalling all morning — sitting on the roof, making conversation with my new hosts, lowkey scared of what might be behind that big clacky front door.
When I finally went through it, I turned right and just started walking.
I didn’t know what to expect, but I found myself in the alleyways that afternoon. For no real reason I ducked into a tunnel of scaffolding, past a man selling socks, past a woman selling sweet flatbreads, and then I saw the strangest thing I’d ever seen. A shop, if you could call it that — a cubby cut into the side of a building, five feet deep, no door, no window. Just a boy in a chair and a man cutting his hair. Completely unbothered. Completely unsupervised. A barbershop in the middle of the street.
I turned around. Made a few more rights. And somewhere in the next five minutes it finally happened — the thing I’d been asking poor Priscilla for my whole childhood. The streets of the Medina snake in and out and around on each other, and I was really inside it now. I had no idea where I was, and no one on earth did either. Thirty-something years late, my wish came true.
I turned another corner and suddenly found myself deposited off the quiet alleyway into the busiest, most bustly square. I was in the middle of the Petit Socco. I sat down at Cafe Tingis and ordered a mint tea.
I’d made it. I was somewhere new — I felt it.
I’d forgotten how much I’d wanted that feeling. The rush was exhilarating to the point that my hands get a little shaky even typing this. I was scared to leave the riad until, suddenly, I wasn’t anymore.
… and Tangier has so much to breathe into.
I hadn’t just wandered into an unfamiliar neighborhood in a new city on a new continent. I’d noclipped out of the loop I’d built my whole adult life to stay inside, and into a thousand years of living history.
For years I told myself I was a world traveler. I wasn’t. I went to the same old city over and over — I went back and forth between America and Paris. I’d drink wine all day, stay until my visa ran out, fly home, detox, and scrape together enough money to do it all again. That’s travel like my childhood guinea pig’s daily exercise routine was travel. I always knew exactly where I was, because I was always in the same place: a few bars, a few blocks, a bottle. You can circle the entire globe and never once be lost, if you’re careful enough. I was very careful for a very long time.
Abstentance from intoxicants has a profound effect on how we spend our time, how we see ourselves in other people, and what we expect from the world around us. There’s something about being alone in a foreign place — sober — that you don’t understand until you’re in the soup of it. Once the novelty burns off, life starts to feel like a silent film. Some people think in pictures. Between my ears there’s a nearly audible tape-loop of dialogue that runs all day, and out in the Medina with no one to talk to and nothing I recognized, I had no choice but to listen to it. I finally met the monkey.
That’s the secret sauce the six-year-old in Venice was chasing down those alleys without knowing it. Getting lost was never about the place. The place is just a stark excuse to make a change. When you strip away every landmark you use to know where you are, the only thing left to navigate by is yourself — and most of us have no idea what that even feels like, because we’ve spent our entire lives making sure we never have to find out.
I know I did.
We have engineered lostness clean out of existence. There is comfort in knowing there’s a benevolent pulsing blue dot in our pocket that always knows where we are. We optimize of our lives so that we never get disoriented — and then we lie awake at 3am wondering why we don’t seem to know who we are anymore. Of course we don’t.
You can’t find yourself somewhere you already hang out.
Here’s the paradox I’ve built my entire life’s work around: we find freedom from structure. You can only let go all the way when someone else is providing the frame to play in.
I’m thrilled to announce Camp Spartel: five days in the Medina of Tangier — September 10th through 15th — across two next door neighboring riads, with a small group of intrepid people who’ve decided they’re done always knowing exactly where they are. It’s not a retreat or a vacation or a “group trip” in any traditional sense. We’ve designed a single purpose container, built to let you get well and truly lost, on purpose, with the safety net of a group of friends who are all there for the same reason.
Where did we get this idea that to recharge, we need to unplug?
We’re plugging IN to Sufi chanting night and cave exploration. A public hammam. Medina scavenger hunts. Group dinners.
Here’s the pitch: You show up. You meet people. You get lost. You find yourself. That’s the whole pitch, and I mean it as literally as it’s possible to mean anything.
Our nanny never did let us get properly lost. She always brought us home— I guess that was her job. But it sure as hell isn’t mine! I’ve spent the years since building the thing I was asking her for, and doing it in a clear headed and safe way.
This September, for 12 people, the answer to that question is — finally — going to be a resounding yes. If this sounds like something you’d be into, check out the link to learn more. Or just reply to this with any questions you have. I’d be so delighted to have you join us.
-JGF
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