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Getting From Here To There

I’m fascinated by how our brains help us navigate our world.

Think about where you live: In time, your surroundings become so familiar you most likely can navigate in the dark. You know where the stairs are and how many until the bottom. You know exactly when to turn from the hallway to the dining room to avoid slamming your hip on the table.

You can sense the subtle nuances of your home by the feel of the carpet or the creak in the floor. You know your cats typically sit in a certain corner of the stairs landmining and almost daring you to step on them. However, you avoid them and live to see another day. You’re almost using the Force.

It’s the same way with our regular commute. Do you have a regular route you take to work every day?  Most of us do. We might alter it a bit here and there. However, for the most part, we pick a route and we stick to it. So much so that, after a while, driving it becomes rote.

Early in my career, I had a commute that I could alter, concocting three or four different routes that brought variety into my week and made the commute a bit less arduous. Then came a few job changes and now I still take the same route, day after day. I know where every pot hole is, every bulge in the pavement, the pattern of the stoplight changes. It’s both reassuring and slightly annoying at the same time.

One of my favorite lines in the film “The Hunt for Red October” comes from the navigator as he’s plotting a course change for the submarine deep in the northern Atlantic midway through the movie. He looks at one of the officers and says, “Gimme a stopwatch and a map, and I could fly the Alps in a plane with no windows.”

That’s still my daily commute.  Is it yours? 

I’m Wester Wuori, and that’s my Perspective.

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