Two people in the same bookshop

Two people walk into the same bookshop in Al Khobar on the same evening.

The first has a title saved on his phone. He checks the fiction shelves, then the new arrivals, then the table by the till. It is not there. He asks, waits, and is told it might come in next month. He leaves irritated, feeling the visit was wasted, as though the shop had let him down.

The second came in with no title at all. She drifts from travel to cookery to a shelf of old poetry she did not know they kept. She picks things up, puts most of them back, and leaves an hour later with a book she had never heard of when she walked in.

They walked the same aisles. Only one of them was lost.

Being lost is not a location. It is a gap between where you are and where you had decided you must be. Take away the decision and the gap disappears. What remains is simply somewhere you have not been before.

That is worth knowing well beyond bookshops. Plenty of people describe a year, a job or a city as the time they were lost, and some of them were. Others were wandering, which is a different activity in the same scenery.

The difference is never the map. It is whether, before setting out, you had told yourself that only one shelf would count.