Labyrinth vs. Maze — Kendra Patterson

Life can feel like a maze, sometimes, don’t you think? You don’t have a bird’s-eye view of things, so how can you decide which way is the right way? You have to blindly choose a direction, only to find yourself at a dead end more often than not. Then you have to backtrack, trying to remember all the choices you’ve made thus far so you don’t take the same wrong route again.

I hate mazes. They make me feel helpless, trapped, and anxious. Put me in a corn maze and eventually I’m going to just bust on through a wall.

Feeling anxiety around not having clarity about the direction of our lives is normal, even for those of us who are experimental types and don’t particularly like setting clear goals or knowing where we’re going. Recently I stumbled upon a way of visualizing things that helps me deal with my fear of the unknown future and making wrong choices.

Instead of a maze, what if life is more like a labyrinth?

We often think that a labyrinth is the same thing as a maze, but that’s not true. A labyrinth has a singular path you follow through a gradual spiral that eventually brings you back to where you started. Here is how the difference is explained by Australian author Amanda Lohrey in her Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel The Labyrinth:

The maze is a challenge to the brain (how smart are you), the labyrinth to the heart (will you surrender). In the maze you grapple with the challenge but in the labyrinth you let go. Effortlessly you come back to where you started, somehow changed by the act of surrender. In this way the labyrinth is said to be a model of reversible destiny.

The maze and the labyrinth couldn’t be more different. The maze has an extrinsic goal: find your way through. And it’s essentially rigged against you, as its purpose is to confound and challenge. Not that those are bad things in and of themselves, but they’re exhausting over time when it doesn’t get any easier, right? (And life never does get much easier, does it?) A labyrinth is based on an intrinsic goal: better understanding and acceptance of the self. It exists to assist you: there is only one way through, and all you have to do is keep going. The only failure is if you give up.

The challenge of a labyrinth is that you have to give up your illusion of control. I say illusion because while a maze may seem to grant you control of your destiny – you can choose your own path, and its solution ostensibly rests on the development of skills over time – it still only has one right route. It finally spits you out when you’ve solved it, but it hasn’t brought you any closer to transformation. All you can say is that you know how to get through that maze. On to the next one.

Surrendering to the journey is what the labyrinth asks of us. You may be thinking, that’s all fine and good but what happens when you reach a fork in the road? You have to make a choice eventually – and you might choose wrong. Or you may feel like you want choices in life, not have to follow a set path, and the labyrinth offers no choice. This is a misconception of the purpose of a labyrinth. It is not taking away your choices, nor is it implying that you have no free will. The labyrinth invites you to see life as a gradual transformation where at each juncture there is a natural way forward. You don’t so much choose as you simply do the next right thing. And nothing is set in stone.

Lohrey characterizes the labyrinth as a model of reversible destiny. It is difficult to grasp what she means in any conceptual way, as we cannot reverse the arrow of time. Her novel The Labyrinth is about a woman who moves to a coastal town to be near her son, who is serving a life term in a nearby prison. To help her through her grief, she builds a labyrinth in her yard that abuts the dunes. And I think that this is what she means by reversible destiny: that through healing we are transformed, and can in a sense start anew.

This is yet another difference between maze and labyrinth. The maze distracts us from ourselves by confronting us with a mental challenge. The labyrinth confronts us with our ourselves by removing all distraction. But it also gives us structure: a path to walk, an assurance of continued guidance, and a promise that we will wend our way back to our truest selves with more clarity about who we are and what we have to offer.