Navigation
Life is complex. Are you on the right track?
I have been blessed with a very good sense of direction. It’s a good thing, too, as it’s high on the list of qualifications for my job. I fly airplanes for a living.
As a young boy, I always had a fascination for maps. Paper maps; no electronics back then. As we would take family vacations from our home in Chicago to northern Wisconsin, my Dad would let me “navigate.” At the time, I was sure that our arrival was due to my advice. Now, I’m sure he knew just where he was going and my direction was secondary.
I then moved on to Boy Scouts and one of the skills we developed was how to track and use a compass. It was interesting, and what an amazingly cheap and useful tool. I still have that compass today. We also learned how to use landmarks and the position of the sun to help determine course and direction. Studying the lay of the land is something I still use, whenever I’m in a new location. Learning about geography in school wasn’t that fun, but using geography to navigate interests me greatly.
I never got to learn celestial navigation, using stars to navigate, and with all of the electronic and technical advances, it’s a lost art, for sure. I have know some people over the years who used it early in their careers or in the military and it seems spectacular to me. The navigator used a tool called a sextant, which seems very complex itself. Of course, it was an important skill necessary for ships long ago to voyage across oceans. Rough seas, shifting winds, fog and cloud cover must have made it difficult for the ancient mariners, not to mention shoals, atolls, coral and other underwater hazards. Maps were useful, but often inaccurate. A good navigator was gold to the crew of the ship.
Today, with the advent of the Global Positioning System or GPS, we have access to an incredible technology. Originally designed for the space programs and military applications, using satellites for communication with our devices, we have access to a system which guides us from any point A, to any point B, with course options and even traffic information instantaneously, along with an estimated time of arrival. Have you ever been impatient with your device when it can’t locate you, or doesn’t recognize your destination? How easily we forget how far we’ve come!
Sometimes, I will look at the route which the GPS has planned and I’ll decide that’s not the way I want to go. Or, I might miss the turn the GPS was trying to direct me to. Thankfully, she (the GPS voice) is flexible and simply announces “rerouting”, quickly providing new instruction. If I designed it, there might be a few choice words for the operator.
As a kid, I also always liked trains. We had a set of 3 tracks at the end of my block and near Chicago, there is a lot of train traffic. As you look at the 3 shiny rail pairs, paralleling each other, it’s easy to think that a train engineer can’t get lost, just stay on the rails. True, in a single rail system, but not realistic. There are many rail lines, switches and people involved where timing, speed control and planning are necessary for a safe outcome. It works most of the time; sometimes it’s deadly.
Life can be like that. On a single rail system, not much room for error. Not very realistic, though. Life is quite complex and there are many twists and turns, rough seas and shifting winds, hidden rocks and shoals to interrupt our plan. Sometimes the hazards are obvious; often they are not. We become adults and trudge down the path of life, not really recognizing it’s taking us to a dead-end. Pride keeps us going, thinking our “arrival” is just over the next hill, and we don’t change course. Where is that “rerouting” option for life?
I’ve been there and maybe you have too. Lost. I thought I was on the right track. I thought I knew exactly where I was until the fog lifted. Then confusion sets in. Perhaps, even vertigo- not knowing which way is up, so to speak. How did I get here? How did it get this bad? This feeling is not discriminate and reaches all levels of society.
The good news is that you have power in you right now, to change course, to reroute your internal GPS, to use the tools you’ve been given; your compass, your sextant, your maps, to find your way to the pathway to your success. It is already programmed in you, but you have to want it badly, to reach deep inside yourself and discover why you’re here, to discover who you are. I’ll see you next time.