Navigation is becoming a lost art. I don’t mean that people can’t find their way around – but the art and science of doing it without a cell phone and gps or map app is becoming a rarity. Rarer still is the ability to navigate from sun, the stars, and those things in the natural world that are always pointing out the directions to us. It’s not that most people have forgotten it, it’s that most people never learned it in the first place. The result is that few modern people have a sense of direction. Take away their devices or connectivity and they are directionless.
With most of the lessons on the skills we cover, the lesson comes first, then there is a something we do with that information that transitions it to knowledge; the active, doing component is what makes it real. We’ve been studying navigation for several weeks, and today it becomes real. Our exercise is to make a map of the area. Using a compass to take bearings, measuring out distance by pacing, and drawing the whole thing up with correct angles, is one of the things we’ll be up to today. And before we start, we have to verify our compasses are working by checking them with the sun. I have two compasses that have become demagnetized over the years; they don’t point anywhere in particular. A quick check with the sun verifys this, and we know to not trust the compass needle. But a demagnetized compass is still a functional protractor, and can continue to be useful.
The takeaway is that it’s the active component, doing something with the information and knowledge, that makes it real and locks it into long-term memory.
