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Lost Without a Compass
When I was a youngster, I was a Boy Scout. I had no choice in the matter. It was something that my mother insisted upon. So each Tuesday, without complaint, I attended the meetings and settled in to learning the scouting way. Back then, in the sixties and early seventies, scouting was a little more rugged than it is today. There were lots of lessons to be learned and not a lot of hand holding. One thing I particularly enjoyed about scouting was going camping. I loved being in the outdoors. It gave me an opportunity to think, reflect and of course experience a sense of freedom that you just could not get in a city or town.
Probably one of my more favorite activities was hiking. I use to love to hike. Many times, when others would not go with me, I would go hiking alone. Most of the time when my troop went camping, we would go to a place called Camp Buckeye. It wasn't too far from where we lived, but it was rural and rustic enough to transplant us into a whole new world. And because of my love for hiking, I think that in a year or two, I knew every acre of that wonderful boy scout camp.
One thing my troop leaders always implored me to do was to take a compass along with me when I went hiking. Most of the time, I would just shove one in my backpack, with no intentions of using it, just to appease my leaders. They were only looking out for my well-being, but I just felt that I knew Camp Buckeye so well, that I just did not need to have a compass with me. After all, this was the 20th century and it was unlikely that I was going to get lost in the woods!
One day I wanted to go hiking and asked a few of my fellow scouts to accompany me. But they wanted to stick around a play "Capture the Flag," so I took off on my own. However, on this occasion, I left my compass behind. The leaders didn't really say anything about it before I left, so I felt they were just confident that I knew what I was doing. It was early fall, with a slight chill in the air, but still good hiking weather. The leaves were changing, but had not yet fallen off the trees, so they still provided good coverage and of course provided some of the best scenery one could imagine. On this hike, I took my time to take in nature. To observe the changing colors of the trees, the occasional fauna as it bounded in front of me and sometimes scooted in fear at the sound of my feet as I walked the twig and leaf covered paths. I was so absorbed in looking above me, that occasionally I forgot to look in front of me. And so, as I stepped, my vigorous gait was suddenly interrupted as my feet gave way beneath me and I went rolling down a hill. It seemed like I rolled down the hill side, into denser brush and forestation, for an hour, when in reality it was only seconds. But it was enough to disorient me. When I came to a stop, I was a little sore, had a few bruises, but nothing was broken. I came to my feet and looked around at what was for the first time, unfamiliar surroundings. I had no idea where I was and for some reason I could not figure out how to get back to the path. I looked around and began to panic. So, I began to walk, with no idea as to my destination. After about 15 minutes of walking, I came to the realization that I was lost. And I had no compass.
I guess eventually I would have found my way out of the mess because after all, it was a boyscout camp and finite. I wasn't exactly in one of the National Parks. But I was still out of sorts and beginning to panic a little bit, when I heard someone called out to me. It was one of my scoutmasters. "Here," he said to me, "You forgot your compass."
I didn't let on to him that I was a little lost. I suspect he had figured it out when he said to me, "When you go on a hike without a compass, you are not on a hike. You are just wandering aimlessly."
Our careers and adult life can be like that as well. So often we live our lives without any direction or without any plan - or compass to point the right way - that we just end up living haphazardly. We have no goals to work towards and we allow our life to putter by and then wake up in our latter years and wonder where all the years went. We need to learn at an early age that we should never go hiking in life without a compass.
Even though I learned this lesson at an early age, I, like so many others, did not allow it to sink in. Don't you make the same mistake. Live your life with a compass. Know where you are going and how you are going to get there. Don't play a guessing game with you future.
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