Hiking home from work the other day under a buoyant July sun, I felt strong and sure on the trail. By this time in the summer, I am in my stride, as they say, and the hike was glorious. Just that morning I had seen a dusky grouse meandering on the trail in front of me. Raspberries had started coming on, and I spied the occasional mushroom blinking up brown through the thick green underbrush. I was in this revelry when I passed a tourist and his son on bikes, and I think that I may have given them wrong directions. Unintentionally, of course, but still. They asked if they were on the right way to the parking lot and I told them no, they needed to turn around. This was true, but upon reflection, the way they were headed would eventually go to a different parking lot, but there was some tricky riding in between that might have been tough for the kid, so maybe I did them a favor.
This incident reminded me of a similar one just a week or so before on the same trail when a woman asked me if this was the way to the bridge and, without hesitation, I said no, it’s the other way about a quarter-mile. After she re-routed herself I remembered there is another bridge on that same trail that she would have come upon had she kept going. I don’t often go that way, so I wasn’t thinking about it. I felt bad afterward, knowing that I should have asked her where she was going first, a key question when you are giving directions.
I don’t like to give directions, mostly because I have never been good with them. I can memorize routes and, if the sun is shining, can figure out the cardinal points, but I have no instinctive orienteering whatsoever. There are complex brain functions involved in wayfinding, and there are two primary processes: allocentric and egocentric. Allocentric is a bird’s eye view that sees components of the area in relation to the other elements. Egocentric uses the self as the point of orientation and is more like following directions: go forward, take a left. If a room is the environment, allocentric is the view of the room from above it; egocentric is your view of the room from the chair you are sitting in.
I have no allocentric ability, which has been a hindrance in the wilderness (also in hospitals and in Vail), but I have some egocentric skills in the sense that I can memorize routes and don’t get lost in my own home. However, I like to help people–almost can’t stop myself from doing it–but when a total stranger reaches out to me on a trail, it is never to ask questions I am qualified to answer, like where does this comma go? Or how does this email sound? No, it is always, always to ask directions. Sometimes my wiser angels are able to stop the overly helpful ones from blurting out the wrong answer, and I find myself taking a deep breath in and saying, “I don’t know,” because usually that is the truth.
But this other part of me, the one that wants so badly to know and to help, sometimes just starts talking to these unsuspecting people and sends them in the wrong direction. One time it was a small group of ladies about my age. Another time it was a young couple who had missed a turnoff. I got turned around and sent them a different way, getting them totally lost. I feel just awful about these things, but in those moments, my small egocentric directional sense grows like a puffball and I believe that what I am telling them is right. I just feel like what I am seeing from my point of view is somehow objectively true for them even when it is quantifiably not. I hope it all worked out eventually for them.
The day after I saw the bridge seeker, I ran into a friend of mine whose teenager is going through it. Held by lush leaves of summer, we paused on the trail to talk. The river roars at this juncture, which gave our conversation a sonic protection as she shared her kid’s struggles and we talked about how hard it is to know what to do for our kids. At first when I started talking, I thought the helpful angel beat the wise one to the buzzer. This time, though, I shared honestly about my uncertainty in the land of teens and even spoke about the false promise and potential harm of sure and easy answers. Though the details of our struggles were different, I shared that my kids both had difficult times and that I was doing the best I could, but I don’t often feel like I really help.
“It’s hard,” I told her. “There are good days and bad days. At first I tried to fix it, offer solutions, but that seemed to make it worse. Then, when there are a bunch of good days in a row I would start thinking that we are on the other side of that tough stuff and it is smooth sailing now, like it’s a hike with a steep uphill and then a lovely ridgewalk. But then it would just level me when the bad days came back. So I stopped doing that. Now I just try to stay in what that day brings–good or bad– and resist writing the future–good or bad. I realized that I can really only just be there for it all, ya know, keep talking. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like much.”
My friend nodded, though she appeared no lighter than when we met. We hugged and parted, and I walked away feeling like I had given her a big bag of nothing. I had wanted to offer something concrete to help her find her way; directions to follow with words like “right” and “north,” and “miles,” but it wasn’t until I was walking away that I realized that the interior landscapes are even harder to navigate than trails and sometimes the best answer is no answer at all.
