The Compass is Inside You and It Always Was

Wisdom finds you + Link Love

A scheduling mishap put us in the way of wisdom a week ago.

When I was a four year old child and probably when I was 25 and 35, I thought wisdom, when finally arrived, arrived with the full and final answer. I thought wisdom was being sure enough of yourself that you could impart surety to others. I sought this.

I don’t mean I sought this surety for myself. I mean I sought it in others.

In fourth or fifth grade, my mother sent me orienteering. They gave us cheap plastic compasses, thin paper maps, and whistles we would wear around our necks. I remember getting lost and it being thrilling. It was the unknown of that thrilled me, but it was also the possibility that we would surprise a bear or the sun would set or, perhaps, that we would locate ourselves in the thick Pennsylvania woods and break, sweaty and exhilarated, into some clearing not with a story of being lost and then found, but of being lost and finding ourselves.

When I was a young adult, my family moved to a new state and my mother bought a road atlas where the roads were enlarged enough to run your finger along as we, once again, learned to become lost and locate ourselves again.

I have lived and traveled all over the world since and never felt lost. There is an internal compass within me, an innate sense of which direction I face at all times, even with my eyes closed. I know how to get home—even when I haven’t known where home was anymore.

But wisdom, she is an illusive thing and not a fixed point. She cannot be found with a compass or map. She cannot be lost, and yet, can only be found.

And so it was that a week ago, a scheduling mishap put us in the way of it.

“How have you learned to make peace with your doubt?” I asked, facing someone double my age and triple my sage.