Lesson One: To Think That One Knows Is Foolishness; To Know That One Does Not Know Is Wisdom.
Our younger daughter, who always finds appropriate greeting cards to commemorate family events, sent us a card for our "fifty-second" which showed a man and woman in a car with the man driving. The woman keeps saying they are lost and should ask for direction; the man keeps insisting they are not lost. Finally she prays silently, "Lord. give me strength." while he is praying, "God, give me patience." Inside the card reads: "The family that stays together, prays together." She could not have known, that possibly at the moment she was selecting the card, her parents were enacting a similar scene.
Under Dianne's expert guidance, we had arrived at "the gates of the city" somewhat later than expected but not much, We were within a mile of our destination, Dianne said "turn left," and i turned right. About an hour and a half later, her niece found us somewhere in the bowels of the city and led us to our destination.
Some people say i could have followed my wife's direction as easily i could that of my own faulty brain. Some say i had no choice other than to do what i did. I honestly don't know!
The planet on which i reside is about five billion years old. During much of that time it has revolved around our sun at approximately the same pace, in the same orbit, and in the same "direction." It also rotates on an an axis which shifts occasionally but not recently, also at about the same pace and direction. I and other parts of the planet are made of the "dust" of the planet (or at least of the same particles that make the dust.) A body not perverted by "extra-terrastrial" considerations knows its way around on its home planet. I have never known an aboriginal who still had some connection to his culture who could not tell me instantly which direction his body was facing .
Civilized humans have learned to distrust nature and have reorganized the planet, as nearly as possible, into a series of rectangles. This squaring of our planet with our own limited sense of reality has had to confront two obstacles, nature's own order, and the fact that our human imposed order is the work of many divergent plans and hands. Thus Idaho Falls' pattern of rectangles is disrupted by a river running through it and by the attempted merging of different patterns of rectangles. Still most residents and most strangers are able to find their ways about in the city.
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"Why do I seem to perceive and process things so differently from everyone else? Why do the sounds and phrases that play a continuous loop in my head seem louder and command more attention than the actual world around me?" -- David Finch (relationship guru who has Asperger's syndrome)
I have a mental map of many cities i have lived in and some i haven't. These maps are usually roughly similar to those of most people, including most residents. My mental map of Idaho Falls is different and it seems etched into the neurons of my brain. Every road that runs north and south seems like it goes east and west, and vice versa. A week is too short a time to train my body to know that things are as they are rather than how i see them. (How many times have i had to say during the past two weeks, "it is what it is.")
I am autistic. I cannot trust my body or my brain to "orient" me to planet Earth. If Dianne tells me to turn left, i should turn left. If the map calls it "North Yellowstone Highway," i should not think of it as "West Yellowstone Highway."
At the end of two weeks i could almost find my way about the western portion of Idaho Falls (or was it the northern portion?) I had begun to trust that people who gave me directions were not deceiving me. My sense of surprise at arriving where i was supposed to arrive had diminished, and a tiny sliver of confidence had begun to reemerge.