Finding the Thread: Intentionality in a Labyrinthine World

In yesterday's post I wrote about living with intentionality — about choosing direction rather than drifting, purpose rather than habit. That idea sounds simple until you look honestly at the terrain we move through each day. The modern world is less a straight road than a maze, filled with diversions that invite wandering without arrival. Which brings us to labyrinths.

The notion of labyrinths traces back to ancient mythology, but it is found throughout history. In essence, a labyrinth is a maze, a puzzle, a complicated route that leads to—or conceals—something. It is not merely a physical structure but a way of thinking about movement, confusion, discovery, and arrival. 

Many writers have made reference to labyrinths in their work, drawn to the image as both symbol and architecture. Jorge Luis Borges was famously fascinated by the idea of labyrinths, which appear repeatedly in his short stories—not always as stone corridors, but as libraries, mirrors, texts, and even time itself. In Borges, the labyrinth is often infinite, or at least suggestive of infinity, a place where the seeker risks never finding the center.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was inspired in part by this fascination. The monastery library at the heart of the novel is a literal labyrinth, but it also functions as an intellectual one: a maze of forbidden knowledge, misdirection, and interpretive traps. What is hidden there is not only a book, but power—and the consequences of seeking it.

From ancient and medieval times to the present, labyrinths have held their appeal, both as real structures to be built and as ideas to be contemplated. The mind itself is often described as a labyrinth, with winding passages, dead ends, and unexpected openings. In literature, numerous characters—from Don Quixote onward—become lost in the labyrinthine worlds of their imaginations, unable to distinguish between what is real and what is desired, what is noble and what is absurd.

 

One of André Gide’s most fascinatng works is his story Theseus, about the Athenian hero who navigates the labyrinth in Crete to slay the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, aided by Ariadne’s thread. Gide’s retelling is elegant and unsettling, less about heroism than about memory, responsibility, and the ambiguity of triumph. It is an entertaining read, with unexpected twists, and it comes with my highest recommendation.

 

My first encounter with the Internet was somewhat akin to the notion of a labyrinth. If one considers each web page a room, from which one must exit to enter another room, it is easy to imagine the World Wide Web as a vast labyrinthine universe. One can wander endlessly, doubling back, following promising passages that lead nowhere, stumbling upon hidden chambers one never intended to find. Time evaporates. Direction becomes optional.
 

It was based on this concept that I created a small labyrinth when I first started building my personal website thirteen years ago. Navigation was not meant to be purely efficient. I wanted visitors to explore, to get slightly lost, to discover things indirectly rather than be delivered straight to a conclusion.

 

And if the Internet is a labyrinth, then where is the Minotaur?

 

Perhaps that question matters more than the answer. In the ancient myth, the Minotaur was the danger at the center, the thing that justified fear and demanded courage—though surprisingly contrary in Gide’s retelling. But modern labyrinths rarely announce their monsters so clearly. Sometimes the threat is distraction rather than death, confusion rather than violence, absorption rather than confrontation. Sometimes the Minotaur is not something we slay, but something that quietly consumes our attention while we wander.

 

And perhaps, like Theseus, what we need most is not a map, but a thread—some principle, intention, or memory that allows us to venture inward without losing our way back out.

In a world designed to keep us wandering, remembering to carry a thread may be the most intentional act of all. Without one, as King Lear warns, “That way madness lies.”

Related
Unraveling the Labyrinth: Literary Connections from Theseus to Borges

Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction