How do you explore ?

You need to turn off the voice.

Not your own—but that sterile, consistent buzz that speaks from your pocket, informing which way is north. Slide your finger across the screen, press the button that says "End Navigation," and feel the calm. Of silence.

Getting lost begins at this point. With an act of surrender.

Most of us avoid this sensation. We have constructed an elaborate architecture of certainty around ourselves: maps that unfold in palms, satellites that track our every movement and applications that calculate the precise minute of our arrival.

For most of history though, getting lost was not a glitch in the system but the system itself. Where exactly am I? Which direction leads home?

That was the norm.

Welcome them. Again.

Choose a direction even if you feel it's wrong. Resist the urge to construct a mental map. It defeats the purpose entirely. Instead, notice how the light falls differently . How the shadows stretch in unfamiliar patterns.

The air tastes of spices you cannot name. Your feet feel a different calibration.

Listen to the peculiar gurgle of water through ancient pipes. The dialect spoken by two old women on a bench —their words incomprehensible but their laughter universal. As you encounter others along the way, don't sidestep them in your haste to catch a sunset selfie. Enter their realm.

The woman sweeping the yard might, if you pause long enough to ask her, reveal that she was born in the room directly above where you stand, in 1943. The child bouncing a ball against a wall might show you a game played nowhere else in the world but on this particular street.

When hunger finds you—as it always does when you are properly lost—follow your nose. Look where locals queue without speaking, because words are unnecessary when food does the talking. You may get caught in the weather. It's ok. There is no better way to get lost than being drenched to your skin, miles from shelter. Your senses sharpen when comfort recedes.

The neon signs reflect in puddles, creating mirrors beneath your feet.

Perhaps you'll find yourself in a quarter where the laundry hangs between windows like prayer flags, where the architecture suggests you've somehow slipped through a fold in the map into another century altogether.

This is good. You are now lost not just in space but in time—the deepest form of disorientation and thus the most valuable.

If fear creeps in, acknowledge it. Fear is inevitable when you explore wonder, and the traveler who seeks one must make peace with the other. The compass in your body is linked to your curiosity, and more often than not it will safely navigate you home.

When it's time to find your way back—and eventually it will be—ask a stranger. The exchange of directions between two humans is ancient ceremony. The directions you receive might be imperfect, even wrong. But most times, they will be good enough to find you the right path.

That too is part of the ritual.

The alchemy of travel transforms us as travellers. Not the path we chose. Tomorrow, we will navigate from point A to point B with precision. But somewhere within us, a new room would have been added. A space we never knew existed before we had the courage to turn off the map and simply walk.

The world has been thoroughly mapped, they say. Every square inch accounted for, every street view captured.

They are wrong.

The territory that matters most, still remains to be discovered, and it unfolds itself only to those willing to venture into the unknown.