You (or someone you're helping) keeps trying to fix a problem without naming what actually went wrong, and every fix circles back to the same place.

The poem opens not with a plan but with a confession: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost." The dark wood is the symptom; the lost pathway is the problem — the loss of orientation itself. Everything after depends on this admission: he can't even see the hill of escape clearly until he says plainly that he's lost. The first truthful sentence is the real beginning.