So many cultures cherish the metaphor of a road or journey to describe life; where we are born is the starting point of that epic. Often the places we grow up in have outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us—they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others. Maybe it’s because of the vividness of their sensory impressions, their genius for establishing deep relationships to their early environments, that children have a strong capacity for the human emotion called topophilia. First defined by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, topophilia is the sense of attachment and love for place. In his book on the subject in 1974, Tuan describes topophilia in universal terms.
Of course, peoples of the desert (nomads as well as sedentary farmers in oases) love their homeland; without exception humans grow attached to their native places, even if these should seem derelict of quality to outsiders.… As a geographer, I have always been curious about how people live in different parts of the world. But unlike many of my peers, the key words for me are not only “survival” and “adaptation,” which suggest a rather grim and puritanical attitude to life. People everywhere, I believe, also aspire toward contentment and joy. Environment, for them, is not just a resource base to be used or natural forces to adapt to, but also sources of assurance and pleasure, objects of profound attachment and love. In short, another key word for me, missing in many accounts of livelihood, is Topophilia.
Tuan’s definition of topophilia is, I think, germane to wayfinding. Across cultures, navigation is influenced by particular environmental conditions—snow, sand, water, wind—and topographies—mountain, valley, river, ocean, and desert. But in all of them, it is also a means by which individuals develop a sense of attachment and feeling for places. Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.
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Mau Piailug was a toddler when his grandfather on the island of Satawal first began putting him in tide pools to feel the ocean’s pull and push. Solomon Awa was a baby when he began traveling by dogsled with his parents from camp to camp. Bill Yidumduma Harney was raised in the bush and spent the nights of his childhood staring at the stars and learning the stories of their movement. In each of these examples, the practice of observation, the education of attention, began early in life, a process of attuning perception to the environment, committing story and intergenerational knowledge to memory. This process is one that Bourdieu might have called habitus, the orienting of human behavior through the transmission of practices, “a whole system of predispositions inculcated by the material circumstances of life and by family upbringing.”
Today the conditions of modern life and technology have changed the skills and knowledge required for survival, and those things that are not learned and practiced are eventually lost. “Everything you don’t practice is a lost skill,” David Rubin, a neuroscientist at Duke University and expert in oral traditions, told me. “People used to build wagon wheels. That’s gone. No one can fix automobiles. I have a car and I can’t check the oil anymore. Things are changing. If we don’t sing ballads, they will be lost. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still capable of doing it.”
While the mastery of navigation in traditional cultures often begins early in life, I discovered that it is never too late to begin learning. And starting the process is extraordinarily simple. It requires no journeys to faraway places or money. It can be as simple as going outside to direct your attention to the environment. It might be the difference between looking down while walking and looking up. It can start with practicing acute observation of the places you already live.
I frequently asked people I interviewed about navigation for their advice on how to accumulate those skills or improve memory, or I searched for answers in their work. Again and again, I was surprised by how simple the answers were. “Learn to draw,” said Rubin. “We don’t know how to represent the world well enough. Actually paying attention to the environment, making empirical observations and organizing them into a system—do that.” Tristan Gooley, the British expert in natural navigation, advises that we focus our powers of deduction on the natural world. Harold Gatty recommended going for a walk, preferably alone, and “think[ing] purely of the external world. The man who walks to solve an internal problem, to ease his mind, or to daydream, is going to learn nothing about natural navigation,” he wrote. “Eventually small hills, stones, trees, bushes, are mentally recalled with very great ease, and in their proper succession, and become bound in the observer’s memory as the links of a chain.”
Véronique Bohbot at McGill University has found that it takes just a couple of months of twice-weekly spatial memory exercises that gradually increase in difficulty—proceeding from recalling the positions of objects in rooms to navigating museums, say—for people to increase gray matter in the hippocampus, and she has created a program called VeboLife that is like physiotherapy for this region of the brain. “We’re teaching people to look at the environment,” she said. She recommends that people interested in cognitive health make changes to their daily routines by incorporating new behaviors into their life, like taking new streets and shortcuts, creating mental maps. John Stilgoe advises his students and readers to start with looking around and “ask always the names of what comes to mind as one walks slightly inland, to look under bridges, to walk in the dark, to ask about color, to always think about what it means to fly as contemporary airline passengers fly, not as teenagers once flew, to find lunch and remember that the food came from a farm, usually a farm in fly-over land, and to think always of home and whatever home means.”
James Gibson believed that we could reeducate our attention. We think of ourselves as existing inside our heads, separate from the world, but he thought we could see it directly and even share those unmediated perceptions with others. The philosopher Albert Borgmann encourages individuals to become cognizant of the creep of technological change into the important centers of their lives, to consider what he calls “focal things.” Focal things and the practice of them require exertion, patience, engagement, skill, discipline, fidelity, and resolve; they engage the body and the mind because they have a commanding presence, they demand our attention. Focal things might be a hearth, a meal, carpentry, a craft, or hunting, and the practice of them might be gathering wood, cooking, building, making, or tracking.
Over the course of writing this book, I made navigation a focal thing, diverting my attention to how I did it, taking note of my surroundings, filing them away in my memory. I took up the habit of wearing a small compass on my wrist to use in new or old places, allowing me to infer directional information from buildings, waves, wind, or trees that I observed. Eventually the compass became less important to divining this information. I took a small journal everywhere so I could jot down little, seemingly insignificant things that I noticed, cultivating a kind of practice of observation, and I tried to notice something at least once a day, though sometimes it seemed like a whole week could go by before I stopped to look around. “On the way to Joaquín’s school is a towering tree with elephant skin–like bark whose leaves and buds are just coming in. The leaves are pale yellow-green and the buds droop like streamers or pompoms. I think it is a boxelder maple,” I wrote one day. I strove to know better the five-hundred-acre park across from my home in Brooklyn by pushing into less-familiar places, and at a scale of intimacy I hadn’t considered before; a grove of sycamore trees or the patches of yarrow I had never stopped to look at.
Even in my own neighborhood I found that I could navigate the “border-land of knowledge into the realm of the undiscovered,” as the naturalist and educator Anna Botsford Comstock has described. In her 1911 book The Handbook of Nature Study, Comstock said that “the study of nature consists of simple, truthful observatio
ns that may, like beads on a string, finally be threaded upon the understanding and thus held together as a logical and harmonious whole.” Comstock’s nine-hundred-page book was an offering to public school teachers and parents, but especially children, who she felt were living in an age of nervous tension and diminished freedom and were at risk of losing the powers of accurate observation, the practical and helpful knowledge that nature provides freely. She wanted children to cultivate through nature study the “perception and regard for what is true and the power to express it.”
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Modernity has brought intense turmoil and change to how we move and the reasons we move. Whether you see this as a positive or a negative development might have a lot to do with how much autonomy, safety, and freedom you enjoy in deciding when, where, and how you get from A to B. While some have gained access to the globe and the ability to travel across it, sometimes on a whim, others are forced into upheaval against their will. The future seems to promise even more of this roiling disruption for the vulnerable among us. The International Organization for Migration reported that in 2015 there were more international migrants than ever recorded before. Some 244 million people now reside in a country other than the one they were born in, and the phenomenon of forced displacement has risen 45 percent in just a few years, fueled by refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Thirty-eight million people alone have been pushed to leave their homes within the borders of their own country by conflict and violence. Climate change is sure to bring increased flight and migration. Even the most conservative estimates predict tens of millions of climate refugees by the year 2050.
At the very same moment these upheavals occur—or perhaps in response to them—society seems ever more determined to regulate people’s movement, to close off certain places through passport controls and physical barriers. Political scientists Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg say the number of fortified borders between countries has massively increased since World War II. In the 1950s there were just two, but over subsequent decades border walls have steadily grown: since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Economist reports, forty countries have built walls against more than sixty of their neighbors. Half of the fifty-one boundaries built since World War II were built in the period between 2000 and 2014; often it’s wealthy countries trying to prevent people from poorer countries from coming in. Should freedom of movement be an explicitly designated human right? “In the context of massive inequality, the current border regime is even more unjustified, akin to the arbitrary and anti-human character of a global caste system,” writes political scientist Guy Aitchison.
The consequences of mass upheaval are the fracturing of communities and the severance of roots that connect us to places and each other. In The Need for Roots, the French philosopher Simone Weil claimed that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” A condition of life is that each human being has multiple roots in order to “draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.” But Weil believed that we had ceased to know the world around us and that “a lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the earth moves round the sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens.” Weil was a teacher, factory worker, member of the French Resistance, and mystic, and she wrote this in the midst of World War II as millions of refugees fled violence and genocide. She warned that uprootedness is the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, leading people to fall into spiritual lethargy or perpetuate their uprootedness against others.
Weil defined rootedness in an interesting way, not as lineage or birthplace but as participation in the life of a community that preserves “certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” As people grow increasingly distracted from the physical spaces they share with their families, neighbors, and community, retreating from one reality into another, will their sense of uprootedness grow? Virtual worlds might provide us with information, entertainment, and a sense of community, but I doubt whether they could ever fulfill all of our moral, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Increasingly, they seem to pose a threat to consensus or shared expectations for the future.
Interestingly, Nazi party member and philosopher Martin Heidegger warned of many of the same ailments as Simone Weil, in particular that modern society was robbing people of a feeling of being at home in the world. Consequently, Heidegger viewed nostalgia and the longing for home as a condition of modernity. The idea of home is powerful and complex. The philosopher Vincent Vycinas describes it as “an overwhelming, unexchangeable something to which we were subordinate and from which our way of life was oriented and directed.” We each bring to this idea of home our own experiences and emotions, of having one or not having one, of deep attachment or pain at losing or being forced from one, feelings that animate us throughout our lives. Even animals follow this pattern of outward journeys and return to a place, on small and grand scales, over a lifetime. Yet it is humans who carry the memories of places we have left behind, to feel the unique longing that in English we call nostalgia, from the Greek words nostos and algos, meaning “return” and “pain.”
Johannes Hofer coined the term in the seventeenth century and used it to describe an illness whose symptoms were “persistent thinking of home, melancholia, insomnia, anorexia, loss of thirst, weakness, anxiety, palpitations of the heart, smothering sensations, stupor, and fever.” Initially, almost all cases of medically diagnosed nostalgia occurred in Switzerland, where Hofer worked. But no race or nation has a special claim over nostalgia. It is a universal affliction. Within a hundred years after the malady was “discovered,” thousands of Scottish soldiers were thought to have died from homesickness. Physicians began documenting cases of nostalgia among Austrian and English soldiers, foreign domestic servants, and African and West Indian enslaved people. In 1897, the psychologist Granville Hall described the possible triggers of nostalgia as “the chirp of crickets, the singing of katydids, the sough of the wind, the pound of the rain, the fragment of a familiar song, and the fleeting resemblance of some place or person to some place or someone in the home situation.” Hofer thought that the disease came from within a part of the brain where animal spirits resided, and that when these animals migrated it caused people to be unable to think of anything but home, and could even cause death if untreated. By the early nineteenth century some doctors thought that nostalgia was caused by the blockage of a homing instinct, and others thought it was the result of an exploratory tendency in conflict with the “mother centering tendency” of humans and other animals. Hall called it the conflict between two instincts, an oikotropic condition of homesickness that leads us toward home and a oikifugic impulse, the desire to travel, that drives one away.
As a kid I moved incessantly from one side of the country to another and back again, moved away from my parents at sixteen, and didn’t stop moving until I was in my late twenties. As a result, I have often subscribed to the writer Robyn Davidson’s definition of a new kind of nomad in the world: people who are physically but also existentially displaced. “This century has witnessed the greatest upheavals of population in man’s history,” she writes in her book Desert Places, about the Rabari nomads of northwest India. “Yet it is also witnessing the end of traditional nomadism, a description of reality that has been with us since our beginnings—our oldest memory of being. And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them.”
Likewise, I never felt I had a home to return to. Yet when I really considered the idea of home, in Cobb’s sense of “a living ecological relationship between an observer and an environment, a person and a place,” I found that I did have a reference, and it was the sma
ll, scrappy chicken farm that I had loved so much and so briefly as a child.
One day when the purple lilacs were just starting to bloom, I packed a car and headed north with my partner and three-year-old son, toward the past. I made a bet: once we arrived at my old elementary school, I would be able to navigate not only through the entire town but all the way to the farm without asking for directions or using a map. I would get us there as accurately as a homing pigeon using thirty-year-old memories. When we reached the school we walked around the overgrown yard of the boarded-up redbrick building, and I marveled at the size of the maple tree that we used to play kickball under, though it was now a stump. I found hidden corners of the nearby woods and my favorite places to play. And then I got in the driver’s seat and drove us without error a few miles down the road.
The trailer we lived in was long gone, but otherwise everywhere I looked I saw evidence of my family’s former life there. Pushing back some overgrown brush I found the telephone pole my mother had embedded into her garden; deep within the lilac bush was the flat-topped stone that had provided the centerpiece of my private world. The apple tree branches were craggy and laden with flowers; the chicken coop sagged just like it had before, though now it was filled with lumber. The birch tree I climbed seemed thicker in girth, and the dirt driveway I had to venture to catch the bus in rain or snow was pitifully short, but it was all so close to how I remembered it that I could have walked around blindfolded. We wandered into the freshly mown field and I showed my son the little crick I had swum in. The water still ran clear and strong, its path unchanged by time. I resisted the urge to lie down and never move again.
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