I was late to the first section of GENED 1031: Finding Our Way because I got lost on the way there, despite the new compass I was carrying in my backpack. The Northwest Laboratories, which is named for its location in the Northwest of campus, was quite hard for me, a first-year following a list of directions from Google Maps, to find. I soon learned that, where I was relying on this “route knowledge” to navigate, upper-year students could find Northwest easily with their “survey knowledge,” which allowed them to take efficient paths they may have never taken based on a mental map I didn’t yet have. I was lost in space, but also in time. I’ve worn a digital watch every day since third grade, metaphorically tying myself to the human-created precision of time that didn’t bind any society until clocks were invented during the Renaissance period. I do my best to adhere to the norms of strict time measured in minutes (despite my navigational slip-up on that first day of section), but I lose track of the time on larger scales like months. How did I get here- metaphorically and literally? 1031 helped me start to answer that question.
I spent the semester jokingly referring to 1031 as my “side-quest class” because I felt like some kind of cool wizard off on an adventure. There’s an unconventional nature to the fading discipline of being outside, looking around, and noticing. I had never imagined being “off to do my Pset” would mean putting on a hat, grabbing my engineering notebook and compass and the exciting, unmarked envelope I had been told to only open underneath the John Harvard statue, and setting out to try and find the location specified while taking careful notes. Each assignment gave me space to reason, start unexpected conversations with people, and step out of my comfort zone and into new areas on and off campus. One day, I carried a protractor with a plumb-bob attached to it and stopped more than a few times to explain that I was measuring the angle of the sun. A different assignment had me ditch my weather app for 9 days and observe weather patterns on my own. One day, I sweat through long underwear on a day with a low of 60 degrees. I recalled to my grandmother how I was opening my window in the morning to feel for the temperature, and she laughed and said, “What a concept!” Friends I told this to shared my amazement that we had never thought of this idea before.
The advent of accessible navigation software has allowed us to usually be moderately efficient, however disconnected. Surely, if we had to carry around a heavy and expensive sextant to measure the angles of stars to know where we were, this would be impractical, and now our society can branch out while our GPS does that work for us. But one day while studying in a garden a friend showed me for the first time, I got turned around trying to get back to my dorm. I opened Google Maps, walking around in circles a few times before realizing I wasn’t sure which way the map was oriented. I realized that I knew I had walked further North than my dorm, so I swapped my phone for my analog compass and began to walk where the needle pointed me South. I emerged a few minutes later in view of Annenberg, and from there I was able to find my dorm without any map at all. Maybe GPS was too advanced for that job; after all, often using a calculator for basic arithmetic is slower than mental math.
I had never before truly been a witness to the seasons, never watched night by night how the autumn constellations were slowly taking the place of the summer ones on the horizon. Slowly, I learned to know what my phone could tell me by looking up from it. I could tell the time of day by the sun’s position, the shadows on the ground, and the time of night by where the stars were in the sky (I was in trouble if Capella and the Pleiades were directly overhead). The wind speed, I knew by a scale based on how the leaves blew on the trees. I watched the winds change direction by Memorial Church’s finial pointing to where the winds were coming from and the clouds drifting by above. I began to feel at home on this strange new campus in October when I had walked the campus with a compass enough to understand its form from the top down. One night I found my way home from the Agassiz Theatre to my dorm only knowing that I was East relative to it, and using the stars to tell me which way was West.
Last night some new friends and I stargazed off of a 5th-floor balcony. Winter had been turning to spring, which I was duly aware of by the way Orion was so prominent high in the Southwestern sky around 10 PM. As my friends and I pointed out constellations to each other, I joked that I had to “put myself back in autumn mode” to understand the spatial relationship between the stars since they had moved so much since I’d memorized where they were. Orion seemed upside down now, and some stars I knew weren’t visible at all in our hemisphere.
Last semester, I had marked the end of Fall by my ability to see the beginnings of Orion in the Northeast late at night, and looking for it every night since had let me track the season change by way of its journey to the other side of the sky. It amazes me how much broader my understanding of time has become since the beginning of 1031, now that I’ve begun to look up every night. Before I could feel time pass in units of seconds, minutes, and maybe hours, but if every night I can notice the moon grow slightly smaller and then bigger, I can understand how the days are passing in relation to each other in months. If I watch the stars every night shift by one degree from where they were the last night at the same time, I can watch seasons change over a year. Maybe, if I’m observant enough, I’ll be able to experience the earth at the timescale of a tree and notice changes in the stars year by year, but that’s a bit ambitious.
People asked me when I told them the name of my class whether “Finding Our Way” was a philosophy class or a navigation class. I laughed and told them we were literally learning the skills of wayfinding, but now I no longer think that “to find one’s way” has a metaphorical meaning that is extricable from its literal meaning. If I can determine where I am in a traversable medium, be it space or time, I find that trivially different from being able to navigate patterns of relationships or stages of life, as these are all subject to the same interconnectedness. I am gaining confidence about finding my way in the world- I know what time of day it is, where I am, what time of year, and how to get where I need to be.