on geography

[calimac]

B. will be driving off soon to a several-day workshop in a town a couple hours drive from here, which is considerably outside our regular traveling orbit. (I've been to the area a few times.) As I am geographically enabled, while she is not, I wrote out detailed step-by-step driving directions to the specific locales to which she's traveling.

Looking over and marking up these directions, she asked me, "Do you memorize directions to where you're going?"

I said: "No. I keep a little map in my head and I navigate off of that. Directions of the kind I gave you I don't find very helpful. If someone gives them to me, I look them up on a map and memorize the map. But I know that a lot of people prefer written directions, so I'm happy to provide those if that's what they want."

And that's what it means to be a spatially-oriented person.

Comments

[bibliofile]

I too can customize directions to how people understand them best. Ordinal directions, left/right, & visual landmarks are all options. (ETA: I work off of visual landmarks a lot, which isn't so helpful for giving directions to places I've been only once.)

It wasn't until I was thirty, I think, that I found out that some people can't read paper maps. It explained a lot about our family driving vacations.