Orienteering

I felt funny standing at the trailhead with a map and compass. We weren’t preparing to step into a vast, untamed wilderness. Families with kids and dogs strolled past us without even glancing up at the map posted on the kiosk, eager to get a leisurely walk in before the big meal. On this Thanksgiving morning, Kate was giving us a beginner lesson in orienteering.

A few days before, Kate, a former competitive orienteer, had gone out and placed ten little flags in the woods and marked their locations on a map. Now, with Susan roasting a turkey back at the house, Eliza and I had to make our way from flag to flag. Many of the flags were close to the trail. We could have found most of them just by working out their location on the trail map. But for each one, we practiced the skills Kate was teaching us.

Keeping track of distance by counting our paces. Aligning our compasses, our maps and our bodies to North at each decision point. Reading the landscape for features that appear on the map. Finding guardrails to follow: trails, bodies of water, ridges. Features we could follow easily without constantly checking our compass.

Toward the end of Kate’s course, one flag presented the opportunity to leave the safety of the trail and bushwhack. I thought it would be easy. Just go around a little hill, course correct, and walk a couple hundred meters through the woods to a clearing where the flag would be waiting.

Almost immediately after leaving the trail, I felt lost. There was a flat, open area that was easy to traverse, and that ease of travel kept pulling me in the wrong direction without me realizing it.

It’s a trap I used to fall into all the time with my work: saying yes to the wrong projects. Projects that seemed easy. Projects that felt like they were taking me in the right direction. Projects that were taking me further and further from where I wanted to go.

Out there in the woods, we used a map and compass to get back on track. In my work, I had to create my own. The 3Ps, a framework I use to help me find the next waypoint.

We made it home with time to spare before the turkey came out of the oven.