I first read Lynn Darling’s Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding shortly after it was published in 2014, and I wrote about it here. It was a Kindle book, one I can no longer access easily, so I put it on my birthday wish list, and just finished reading it again, this time in hard copy.

Re-reading a book that struck a chord is always risky. Will it still put the world to rights? Will it still make my heart sing?

I’m happy to say that this book did. Whether it means I’m still finding my own way (I am) or that the writing holds up (it does), I can’t say exactly. Probably a little of both.

I pulled out my pen often to scrawl notes on an index card. “So much of direction, of having a sense of direction, is bound up in a sense of place, of knowing where home lies even when you don’t know exactly where you are,” Darling writes.

She makes an argument here for long acquaintance with a locale, for knowing it so well that you’ve named the trees. But at the end of her memoir she leaves her home in the Vermont woods and moves back to Manhattan, a place that was “both present and past.”

What I took from this book upon second reading is the importance of remaining flexible as we age. Yes, we might move to the Vermont woods in search of solitude. But what’s to stop us from moving back to a bustling city four years later, if we can afford it and that’s what we want? Finding our way means staying open to all the possibilities of life, to changing our minds and accepting the detours, no matter when or how often they come.