The pleasures of getting lost
Maps have made us worse at wandering. (1) ___ The phone in the pocket speaks with a calm authority, and we have learned to obey it in the way that earlier generations obeyed a signpost.
Yet anyone who has taken a wrong turn in a strange town and been rewarded with a courtyard, a bakery or a view will recall the experience with more affection than any efficiently completed route. (2) ___ Psychologists who study memory suggest that effort and surprise are what fix a place in the mind; a journey with neither leaves hardly a trace.
This is not an argument for abandoning navigation altogether. (3) ___ Nobody sensible wishes to wander across mountains in fog out of principle. What is worth defending is something smaller: the willingness, on an ordinary afternoon with nothing urgent waiting, to leave the instructions switched off and see where the streets lead.
The practice is harder than it sounds. (4) ___ Each time we hesitate at a junction, a voice inside us asks why we should risk twenty minutes when the screen would settle the matter in two. The honest answer is that the twenty minutes may be the only ones of the day that we remember. (5) ___ For that, a little disorientation is a modest price.
Writers on travel have long suspected as much, and the better ones tend to pay more attention to the unplanned afternoon than to the monument they set out to see. (6) ___ Perhaps the best way to begin is with a rule so gentle that it hardly counts as one: once a week, take the second street on the left, and see.