Finding Freedom in Getting Lost

Decades after the AIDS crisis, I still carry a lesson from a friend: Losing your way on purpose can help you endure grief and rediscover joy

Steven Petrow,

AARP

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Published June 11, 2026

an illustration shows two male friends in car, with vivid colors pouring past them

”Let's get lost,“ my friend said. We did, and found solace.

Marcos Chin

I think about my friend Kurt a lot these days, although it’s been more than 40 years since he taught me an important life lesson: To find yourself, sometimes you have to first get lost.

Kurt and I met as volunteers at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, when the virus known as HIV spared almost no one who’d been infected. On Thursday evenings we answered panicky calls on the hotline, while too many of our friends succumbed to the plague one by one.

After each shift I drove home to Berkeley in my rickety VW Beetle, emotionally spent by what I’d experienced that evening. Sometimes I turned to my friend Jim Beam; other nights I’d sit on my back deck, staring into the night. Overwhelmed. Enraged. Often crying.

A year after we began volunteering, Kurt turned to me during our shift and said, “Let’s get lost.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. He saw the confusion cross my face. “Let’s find a time to get in the car, drive and drive, until we get lost. No destination,” he explained. “We’ll stop when we get hungry.”

“Sure,” I replied, with not much enthusiasm. He tried to gin me up: “I’ve done this before. You’ll see.”

A few days later I picked up Kurt, who was an artist and a bodybuilder, at his flat near Golden Gate Park. He jumped in and I shifted into first gear. We were off … to somewhere.

Shrouded in fog, San Francisco looked ethereal in my rearview mirror as we drove over the Bay Bridge toward Oakland. “I’ll let you know when to turn, but I’m not the navigator, because that implies I know where we’re going,” he said softly. I simply nodded.

Once off the bridge, we stayed on I‑80 as the mighty interstate took a northward swing. We zipped by Berkeley and then a row of East Bay towns that I knew only by name: El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules. Then Kurt directed me off the freeway. Every couple of miles I’d hear, “Take this left,” “Go straight here,” “Let’s make a right.” We danced like this for an hour or so.

“Sometimes getting lost is a good thing, as it forces us to be more aware of our surroundings,” I’d once read in a book of travel essays. Indeed, at each juncture — left, right or straight — I paid close attention to a gas station, a church, even an historic hotel, thinking of them as breadcrumbs, to make sure we could find our way home. This was long before the age of GPS and cellphones.

“Do you know where we are?” I finally asked.

“Nope,” replied Kurt, with a supremely contented look on his face.

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“You mean we’re lost?”

“Yup!”

I wish I could say that we ended up in an open meadow covered in wildflowers. Or on a coastal overlook, where we watched whales breach. But no such luck. All our turns had ultimately taken us to a dead end, leaving us at what appeared to be a scene from the movie Mad Max: a postapocalyptic wasteland containing a vast maze of chimney stacks, steel columns and huge fuel containers. Smoke billowed from several of the chimneys. This sprawling industrial complex showed no signs of life. A sulfurous odor engulfed us.

I realized we’d driven to a massive oil refinery near Martinez, a plant known for its repeated violations of environmental and safety codes.

Ravenous by now, we noticed a small café just outside the gates, strolled over and ordered ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread. While eating on the porch, we watched the smoke rise, staining the sky.

You might think our experiment had failed us, having delivered us to such a toxic site. But here, where nothing was familiar, I felt disconnected, untethered, from the life and places I knew, which offered a certain kind of freedom, even elation, which is just what Kurt hoped we might experience.

We finished our lunch and then drove back, passing the gas station, church and hotel I’d noted earlier. We crossed the Bay Bridge to the city, headlong into the fog — and back into the regular programming of our lives.

I deposited my friend at his front door. Before he got out of the car, I thanked him. “See you on Thursday,” I said.

For many years afterward, Kurt and I referred to “our adventure in getting lost” as the foundation of our friendship. He’d helped me find what I needed most right then: a temporary antidote to the encompassing darkness of that time.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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Steven Petrow is a longtime contributor to The Washington Post and The New York Times. His most recent book, The Joy You Make, is published by Maria Shriver’s imprint, The Open Field.