Is getting lost a bad thing?

I took Zoe (the dog) out for a walk this morning.  Being Thanksgiving, I figured it would be a day where we both would do well with a little exercise to start things off.

I enjoy walking in the early morning.  The quiet and solitude are good for my mind.  What I didn’t anticipate was how very quiet it would be on this Thanksgiving Day morning.  Shortly after leaving the house I found Zoe and I were a bit lost.  This didn’t bother Zoe since she mostly goes on walks to find stuff to sniff.  Where that stuff is doesn’t matter all that much to her.  I’m OK with this philosophy of walking but find myself tied to the idea that after the walk I’ll want to enjoy a cup of coffee and some breakfast in the comfort of my own house.  This constraint requires that I have an idea of where I’m at and where my current location will lead to.

I realized the problem was that it was too quiet for me this morning.  I sometimes forget how much I rely on audio queues to figure out where I am.  As I travel through the neighborhood I use the sound that come from the nearby streets and highways as a audio GPS in my head.  In the absence of the usual traffic flows I found I was not able to figure out just where I was on our walk.

I figured I had three options:  try to find my way back home and give up on the walk, sit down on the ground where I was and wait for some kind soul to come and rescue me, or just keep walking on the assumption I would figure out where I was at some point.  I chose the last of these options as I didn’t want to waste a good walk by just giving up.  Besides, we were already lost so we’d have to figure out where we were to get back home.

As it turned out it didn’t take too long to figure out where we were.  The tactile, visual, and audio queues soon added up to reset my mental GPS.  As I got my bearings I realized it was a good experience to spend just a little time lost.  How else do we really know where we are unless we occasionally get ourselves a little lost.