Have you ever been lost?
You know the feeling—not sure which way is up, which is down, whether you are moving closer or farther from your destination. Maybe it doesn’t happen as often these days thanks to GPS and turn-by-turn navigation, but if you’ve ever gotten lost, you understand how demoralizing, how confusing it is. Not knowing which way to move saps our will to do anything at all.
I know that I have felt that way myself—just totally upside down, with the undeniable panic that sets in when we realize we don’t even know where we are. Not a good feeling.
For reasons that have not revealed themselves to me, I thought of Flight 19 this morning, which led to considering what it means to be lost.
To set the mood, please listen to Andrew Hill’s composition “Flight 19.”
Summary: Flight 19 was a group of five TBM Avenger bombers that departed U. S. Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale (Florida) on the afternoon of December 5, 1945 for a routine training mission and never returned. Intended to conduct a bombing run and navigation maneuvers over the Atlantic Ocean, the flight seemed to be proceeding normally on a clear day when Fort Lauderdale received a message from flight leader Lt. Charles Taylor: “Cannot see land. We seem to be off course.”
I am not in a position to pierce the mystery of what happened, though the consensus seems to be that the commander erroneously believed that Flight 19 had passed the Florida Keys and was in the Gulf of Mexico when in fact they were most likely in the Atlantic Ocean. Heading east put them further from Florida rather than closer, and it is believed that the planes ran out of fuel and were forced down over the Atlantic Ocean. No wreckage has been found. Compounding the tragedy, a PBM-5 Mariner search and rescue plane was destroyed by a mid-air explosion. Altogether, 14 members of Flight 19 and 13 search and rescue personnel lost their lives on December 5.
Speculation about what “really happened” to Flight 19 fueled the popularity of the Bermuda Triangle, a popular legend that the sea and airspace within a triangle with corners at Bermuda, Southern Florida, and Puerto Rico was prone to mysterious disappearances and unexplained anomalies. Part of the reason might be the audio transmissions sent by the doomed aviators. I will pull a few quotes here:
“We cannot be sure where we are. Repeat: Cannot see land.”
“Everything is wrong. We can’t be sure of any direction.”
“Everything looks strange, even the ocean.”
“We can’t tell where we are…everything is…can’t make out anything.”
“It looks like we are entering white water… We’re completely lost.”
When viewed through a certain lens, we can read those transmissions and think of alternate dimensions, alien abductions, and otherworldly phenomena. Or maybe it is just confused words from airmen who can’t find anything familiar—which is actually much scarier, when you think about it. I mean, we feel reasonably safe from random rifts in space and time, particularly when they manifest over far-off waters. But the thought of fourteen experienced aviators on an unexceptional training flight becoming so disoriented that they can’t find land—that is nightmare fuel. If it can happen to them, it can happen to us.
(This, incidentally, is one theory for why conspiracy theories and unexplained esoterica are so appealing—they are, in effect, a security blanket assuring us that bad things happen in exceptional circumstances, not because of random bad luck. The game is rigged, so to speak, from the start.)
If you guessed that I’m not writing about Flight 19 for its own sake, you might want to buy some lottery tickets—you guessed right. Flight 19, for me at least, is a metaphor for something that I see quite often as an ombuds—people who can’t see land (figuratively) and are completely thrown off by the lack of landmarks.
There are several different scenarios. Someone starts a job with a set of expectations and discovers that reality is different. Someone is unsure why their colleagues don’t seem to value their input. Someone can’t understand why their supervisor is frustrated with them, or why their employee doesn’t do things how they should be done.
Different scenarios, but essentially the same feeling: “Everything is wrong… I am completely lost.”
And I’m not going to lie. Sometimes when people share their stories, I start to feel lost, like there is information missing that might help everything snap into place, but without it, we’re just burning fuel with no sight of home.
The first lesson of Flight 19 is that it is easy to miss important information, and sometimes we don’t know what we are missing until it is too late. One way to keep from getting too far off course is to frequently check where we are, and check in with others. Starting a doom loop about a brusque email or tense conversation? Maybe speak with someone else to get some perspective.
The second is that sometimes things aren’t really as strange as we think they are. The islands below Flight 19 weren’t the Florida Keys, but the Bahamas—which is what they were supposed to be. It might be tempting to think that we’re over terra incognito, but sometimes things really are as they appear. If someone says that they are disappointed because of how a project turned out, there might not be a deep conspiracy here: more than likely they are telling the truth. And if by chance they aren’t, taking their words at face value might help you get some perspective on what is really going on.
The third lesson is one we can all take to heart: poor communication can compound misunderstandings into disasters. One of the issues, besides broken compasses, was problems with communication. Had the pilots been able to communicate more clearly with other pilots in the area and their base, they might have had a better chance of making it home. Sometimes poor communication isn’t anyone in particular’s fault, but even then it might make sense to invest some energy in speaking and understanding each other before plotting a course.
I guess that leads me to my last and most important point. When everything looks strange, when we feel completely lost, even worse than the sense of dislocation can be the sense of isolation. Circling back to the first lesson, making contact with someone else can be a great help. Even if you can’t get a compass reading, at least you won’t feel alone. And that can make navigating even unfriendly waters just a little less intimidating.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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