Where Am I?
Does it matter? A good sense of direction helps!
Do you get lost at the Europark trying to find your way from one end to another? Is searching for your home on a map like looking for a needle in a haystack? Does a simple grocery-shopping trip take extra long because you end up going off course in the aisles? Do you enter a new city with a feeling of dread, uncertain about finding your way back to your hotel? Well, join the club! “What club?”, you may ask. The club for those with an underdeveloped sense of direction – frequently called the CPLS =
Club of the Perpetually Lost Souls.
“Sense of direction isn’t really a sense at all, because it actually involves the use of multiple senses”, says Mary Hegarty, the principal investigator ata Spatial Thinking Lab at the University of California. “It’s a complicated process.”
You better believe it is! And some wellmeaning direction-providers seem bent on making it even more tortuous than necessary. If you are giving me directions, why try to confuse me with words like north, east, south or west? Just tell me to go right or left! And why make things difficult by offering various routes – “You can go this way … or if you like, you can go that way …” Good God!
So why do some people have a poor sense of direction? It might depend on more than your spatial awareness. Self-confidence plays a role, too. I once had a friend who flippantly announced at a party, “Suzan couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag.” Ouch! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Perhaps this deficit is the cause of my undying fascination for migrating creatures. How is it possible that certain whale species travel thousands of miles, e.g. down the US eastern shore to Florida, where they give birth to their calves and then make the arduous journey back up the northern seaboard? OK. Whales have pretty sizable brains. But what about North American monarch butterflies? These are the most recognizable butterflies in my state of Ohio. They have a relatively large wingspan with the males’ wings displaying wide black veins on a bright orange background. Imagine this: Monarch butterflies (Generation X) mate and lay eggs in their winter grounds (Mexico). That generation (Gen Y) hatches and progresses northward. At about halfway, Gen Y lays eggs. These ‘babies’, Gen Z, continue onward and spend their summer in lovely Ohio, feeding on milkweed plants. This means that these monarchs made their way to Ohio without ever having been there before! Unfathomable, right?
A more pertinent example of excellent ability to receive directions, adventure forth and return home is bees. We all learned in school about – or at least we tried to comprehend – the complex way in which bees communicate. We drew diagrams of their waggle dance and their round dance. We attempted to imagine how the scout bee first regurgitated nectar in the hive to share with her girlfriends, thereby exciting them about some rewarding source of nectar. Then her dance explained where to find it. Amazing! BTW: we have an Austrian scientist to thank for what we know about bees – Karl von Frisch – who received a Nobel Prize for his research. In his honor, there even stands a bust in St. Gilgen, where he spent many a summer.
To re-address our original topic (finding the way), if you often feel discombobulated, there is a solution: Keep your phone with you and make sure it’s charged. And perhaps stop focusing on the destination. As Steve Jobs liked to say to his team: “The journey is the reward.”