Six riders spread across miles of rough terrain, driving the flock down into the valley. My radio malfunctioned somewhere in the first hour. The landscape was alien — volcanic, vast, nothing familiar to orient by. I had two distant points to navigate between and still managed to go in the wrong direction.

Then I heard it.

Not out loud. Inside.

What followed was immediate and primitive. A flood of activation — fear, anger, shame, confusion. Worst-case scenarios arriving faster than I could dismiss them. I could spend the night out here. I could die out here. My mind started tearing through its files — when have I been in this before, what do I know to do, what are the survival moves, how do I not screw this up.

My horse felt all of it before I'd even named it.

He became agitated, then skittish, then bucked me once.

I stood there in the wind holding his reins, and something became very clear.

The panic wasn't helping. It was transmitting.

It doesn't stay inside you. It moves through everything you're in contact with — your horse, your team, your client, the room. It clouds judgment and erases creative impulse. It sends you grabbing at the first familiar thing, repeating the same moves that aren't working, running worst-case scenarios that drain the energy you actually need.

I see this in leaders navigating complexity. In coaches whose models or approaches have stopped working. In founders between chapters. In our daily lives, the world has recently handed a situation that our existing maps can't read.

The moment of being lost arrives — in a boardroom, a relationship, a career, a culture — and the overwhelming impulse is to get found. Fast. Grab something familiar. Get back to known territory.

And that impulse is exactly what cuts off the intelligence that lostness activates.

This is the first move.

Not to stop fighting the lostness.

To inhabit it completely.

Be lost — in your being, not just your thinking. Totally, honestly lost. Stay with the panic and through it. Stay in the not-knowing rather than fleeing toward the first familiar thing.

This is the place most people never reach because they leave too soon.

And it is precisely here — in the full inhabitation of not-knowing — where something new becomes possible. Where creativity stirs. Where transformation has room to begin. Where the question stops being something you're working and starts working you.

The second move is orientation. And it can only begin from here.

I walked with my horse for a while.

Not toward anything. Just walked.

The ground was still unfamiliar. The radio still silent. Nothing had changed.

And then something from my past career in intelligence kicked in. Not consciously — more like a sequence that had been practiced enough to arrive on its own. Recognize the panic. Don't fight it. Breathe. Center. Let the activation move through rather than feeding it or suppressing it.

Situational awareness.

The horse felt it immediately. His agitation settled as mine did.

And then my internal antennas came online.

The senses sharpened. Really sharpened. Everything became vivid — vision, hearing, the feel of wind direction on my skin and in my ears. I started reading the terrain differently. More sensitive to the best footfalls. Moving more carefully, more consciously.

I took stock. What had I seen? What had I missed? What did I actually have to work with?

I wasn't found. I was still lost.

But I was lost differently.

The panic had been working me. Now the situation itself started to work me. Not me working it — something subtler than that. A receptivity came online, which had been drowned out by the panic.

I started to notice what was actually there rather than what I feared was there.

A rider appeared on the distant horizon.

We found each other.

I know now what shifted — not a decision but a sequence. The panic recognized, the breath found, the nervous system settling enough for perception to widen. The training doing what training does when you stop overriding it. (That's why there are practices in the Pivot.)

What I still can't fully explain is the quality of what came online in that stillness. Something more than technique. Something that felt less like doing and more like remembering. Something that felt quite old inside me that knew how to orient.

Maybe that's the part worth staying curious about.

You may never herd sheep in Iceland.

But you know the flash.

That moment when something inside says — quietly, or not so quietly — I don't know where I am anymore.

It might arrive in a boardroom. In a conversation that suddenly goes somewhere unfamiliar.

In a career that made sense until it didn't.

In a world that keeps shifting faster than your map can keep up.

The terrain is different. The stakes feel different. But the internal sequence is remarkably similar.

The flash of recognition. The flood of activation. The rush to grab something familiar and get found as fast as possible.

And the same thing gets cut off.

Once I work with the panic and I let the lostness come full on, I then try to orient:

What am I actually walking into here?

And when something feels off but I can't name it:

What is different or missing?

Not questions to answer quickly. Questions to stay inside. To let work you the way Iceland worked me — slowly, sensorially, from the outside in.

The first opens your attention. The second deepens it.

Together, they create a small gap between the lostness and the reflex to escape it. And in that gap, something more intelligent than panic becomes available.

The maps are not working right now. For most of us, in most domains, the terrain has shifted faster than our navigation systems can keep up. The metacrisis isn't a problem to solve with better information. It's an invitation to develop a different relationship with not-knowing.

Get lost. Consciously if you can. Willingly if possible.

Stay lost a little longer than is comfortable.

Let the antennae work.

And notice what becomes available when you stop trying to get found.