Even though I often ignore the pleasant-sounding woman who tells me when to turn left or right, I think any of the directional apps available are a true blessing especially for those of us who remember how hard it was to use a map the size of a picnic blanket while driving.
However, I think we’ve all lost something by becoming the slave to the GPS master. Maybe we haven’t lost our way, but we’ve lost something I consider to be very important. We’ve lost our sense of direction.
Before Waze and the like took the world by storm, we had to develop a sense of direction, meaning that we had to have a map in our mind. We had to have a sense of where we were and where we wanted to go. In short, we sort of had to know where we were going was in relation to where we were.
Often this “know how” came from experience and a knowledge of roads and the location of towns. Even before I began driving on Long Island where I was raised, I knew the major roads and the connecting roads. Living in Seaford, LI, I knew that Amityville and Babylon were to the east and that Baldwin and Rockville Centre were to the west. Manhasset was to the north and west of Seaford. Got it?
I still might have needed written directions or had to refer to a map, but I could put my mental compass to work and use it to my advantage.
Waze and other similar apps make having a sense of direction obsolete.
Taking the practicality of direction apps and segueing into the realm of analogies and metaphors, I believe that many of us have lost our sense of direction. Not only do we not know how to get there, we don’t even know where “there” is!
Many of lack any direction, and I think this is a problem facing today’s young people because our young people have been using a GPS their whole lives. And I have to admit it isn’t entirely their fault. Their parents have plotted out so much of their lives that they never needed a sense of direction.
Don’t get me wrong. Parents should provide their children with direction, but they should not plot their children’s life out as if they were playing the classic game of RISK.
Today’s young person is told they have to do this and they have to do that. They are told they have to go to college and they have to major in this or major in that. They spend four years in college following a GPS. What they don’t do is think about where they are (and how they got there) and where they WANT to go.
I know that in math the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but life is not two plotted-points. Life is like a yellow brick road.
And to those who believe Dorothy was a victim of following a road not of her choosing, think again. Dorothy was following her winding road. Her YBR was unique to her.
We are all, or we all should be, following OUR yellow brick road. And how do we follow it? We follow it by using our head, following our heart and having the courage to keep on going.
Along The Yellow Brick Road 