If Lost Start Here is a guide for the anxious, curious, lonely and lost. Featuring everyday places and at-home prompts designed to help you live a life that feels good.
HowTheLightGetsIn Festival
Make your own riverside tent and join the world’s largest philosophy and music festival this weekend.
Lost in Place
When you thrive out in the world, in the places you love, that coping strategy is impossible to recreate right now. There isn’t an app for smiling at a stranger across a crowded cafe, or for the way your dress flutters against your legs on a perfect spring day. No amount of control or self care or intention can account for a need for something that is real and physical and palpable. Here we look at how the stay in place orders are starting to affect our mental health even as we look for silver linings.
Imaginary Places
This week we decided to pull together some of our favorite imaginary places (from TV shows, plays, movies and books.) We found that it was quite fun to imagine where we’d love to spend our time, if reality weren’t a confine.
Learning to Count to 100
This week we’re learning to count to 100, listing the things we value, we need, we’ve lost and gained. What would your list include?
Scrappy adventures at home
This weekend we brought the outside world indoors. Now we’re trying to bring the magic of the undomestic world home.
Collective Care // A Guide to Supporting Others While Supporting Ourselves
It’s with dual tensions in mind that we offer up our first shopping guide to supporting small during uncertain times.
Temporarily Closed // How the places of our lives have come home to us.
Wherever you are, we hope that you are finding your place. If you need some inspiration we’ve pulled together some of our favorite locations and how they are bringing themselves to you during these unusual times.
The Regional Assembly of Text // Update
We revisited one of the first places that we featured in our guide to see how they are sustaining a creative enterprise in the current pandemic.
Why bother? // Self-care in a time of uncertainty with pioneering author Jennifer Louden
Before the impacts of the current pandemic began to be so keenly felt, we were lucky to talk to one of the original pioneers of the self-care movement, Jennifer Louden. Posting this now, we’re finding that Jen’s wisdom here and in her forthcoming book Why Bother can be a helpful guide for approaching our current situation.
Isolation Inspiration: 5 Times The Internet Really Pulled Through This Week
Comedians are performing, children’s authors are reading their books, musicians are putting on concerts in their living rooms (!!) people are CONNECTING in any way that they can, all in the name of banding together to protect the most vulnerable members of our communities. (I know it’s the internet, and social media at that, but there is a real beauty here and I hope it is not lost on us.)
Collaborative Action in Self-Isolation
Share how we can come together to support community spaces and independent businesses through this unprecedented time, and help them keep the lights on.
Shifting Course // New Editorial Guidelines
We’ve reworked our editorial guidelines to help you best meet evolving mental health needs in this time of uncertainty. We’d love you to write for us, contribute an idea or support our work however you can. Collectively we’ve got this.
Give Yourself a Break: A Homeschool Mom’s Guide to Loving Your Kids and Lowering Your Expectations
My friends keep asking me: “How do you homeschool ALL the time?! I am going crazy!! What’s your secret?!”
To which I keep responding:“You do realize that ‘homeschooling’ is much harder in the midst of a global pandemic when we are all panicked and locked indoors, right? Have you considered just doing a completely mediocre job??”
Lost at Home: Prompts for thriving while social-distancing
We’ve put together a quick guide for how to maintain your mental wellbeing while social-distancing.
Tilden Regional Park
At a moment when many of us are turning to nature, guest writer Kat Vellos finds her calm at Tilden Regional Park
Tomato Education
Emotional Intelligence isn’t just for us grown-ups. Agata Dela Cruz talks to the owners of Tomato, a consciously designed toddler space in London about how it’s also for our little ones.
The Natural History Museum
Illustrator Michaela Hobson revisits an old favorite, London’s Natural History Museum, and finds a place for inspiration, knowledge and respite.
A Space of One's Own // Part 1
This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating female-identifying space makers. Since we launched If Lost Start Here, we’ve found again and again that many of the places that are thinking about our mental wellbeing differently have been founded by women.