I’m happy to be back behind the microphone after a couple of weeks that I could not really broadcast live, due to the fact that I was competing exactly in prime time with the NBA Finals and the Knicks. Now that they have won, now we can resume our regular programming.

I can tell you that for many years, I’ve been able to always have my bearings. I know my directions. Of course, from time to time, I depend on the car compass to tell me where am I heading, but regardless, I always have my bearing. I know where I am and which direction I’m heading.

In the past, I’ve talked about how difficult it is to get lost these days. We have an assortment of GPSs, we have Google Maps, we have Apple Maps, we have Waze, and some other technologies in cars that always tell us where we’re heading and where we’re going.

Perhaps many of you, just like myself, remember getting verbal direction to a destination, and even later on, even getting direction and printing them from MapQuest. Remember MapQuest? Yeah, was my dad’s favorite GPS.

In life, we are often told, “You got to have some goals and some plans. If you don’t know where you’re going, you most likely never going to get there.” And you got to have some kind of a road map, a step-by-step, turn-by-turn plan of how to get there.

I happen to agree with the majority of it. However, if you ask my wife, she will tell you that not every trip has to have a destination. That sometimes, wondering is pretty good by itself. There is some kind of a, I guess, power in getting lost. Or at least sometimes.

Some of the most meaningful discoveries happen when we just don’t know where we are going. And it’s not only getting lost in a foreign city or on the road. It’s also getting lost in some ideas, even music. You break the pattern somehow, and that certainly open the door for some new discoveries, surprises, and, I would say, clarity as well.

I came across a beautiful quote by Henry David Thoreau. It says, “You must get lost before you can find yourself.” You can choose to believe it or not. In some cases, it’s correct. And then another beautiful quote by J.R.R. Tolkien: “Not all those who wander are lost.”

For me, the journey of discovering new music is just that. I may be reaching for one specific song that lead me to another, and then that may lead me to another, and I sit sometimes for hours and wonder from one genre to another, from one song to another, from one artist to the other. And that’s how I discover some, absolutely some of the most fabulous music I ever found.

I get lost in the process. I get lost in the playlist. I do not have a road map, nor do I have an atlas or a compass. And I don’t know what the final sequence is, which songs I’m going to play till about an hour or two before the show.

I just find the way, select the song, sequence them, and produce the program. Just like this evening program: new stuff, old stuff, all right here on East to West.