TL;DR

I’m bad with directions.

I don’t know what it is but by the second direction I’m given verbally and maybe the 6th on paper I start to have problems. Be it on buses, foot, and I’d imagine by car, it doesn’t seem to matter. Some part of me thinks that it’s a consequence of never having learned to drive, to navigate by the four cardinals and lefts and rights. While walking to a friend’s yesterday I was given a simple set of directions:

Easy, right? Nothing to it. Here’s how it went down.

I get off the into Beri-UQAM, fumble around in my pockets for my last metro ticket. Found, look at the map and figure out which line and direction to take. The metro trip is uneventful, only a couple of stops, and I get out onto Mont-Royal and turn left. This is when things go wrong. At some point during a trip a weird feeling of unease and insecurity settles in. Did he say right or left? Ste-Denis or Ste-Urbain? I think it was Denis, okay, let’s do that. I recognize a couple of places from the other night. No, this isn’t right at all. The addresses are in the right range and Will told me that the addresses on one street will be the same at the same east/west location on any street parallel so I’m not too lost. Okay, these one-way streets should take me back somewhere. Hmm, like a little residential area, not much lighting, if this was Manila I bet I would be dead now. Back on Mont-Royal, okay, so if I go the right way I’ll end up at Ste-Urbain and if I go the wrong way then it’ll be Mont-Royal and then I can just try again. Alright. There’s that confederate hat in the hat shop window, but, wait, no, it was on the left side, gotta turn around. Oh hey now all of these make sense. Drug mart, kebab place, grocery store, alright. Should be a left here on Ste-Urbain, yeah that stencil graffiti of Che Guevara with Groucho Marx glasses looks familiar. And it’s downhill which means south, good. Okay keep going remember that you have to go past Rachel first. First door, second door, there.

So really it took about half an hour longer than it would normally. This has happened at least twice this week. As far as I can tell, I either don’t trust my memory or there’s an inexplicable need to test the boundaries of the directions, find out where the cardinal directions are, find some landmarks, who knows. But that’s how it goes.
Learning is as much a subtractive process as much as it is an additive one. Learning to avoid mistakes and errors and cut out unnecessary or inefficient steps are all vital to attaining some degree of mastery of a concept. A number of pretty smart brain theorists think the brain is good at this very thing, that learning is an atomic process, all of the information around us being filtered and channeled and processed and digested in miniscule bits, making tiny tweaks to our reactions and procedures as we adjust to the unending complexity of our environments.

It’s not unlike the rest of the body, cellular in scope. Each tiny piece of our experience reacts only to those adjacent or near it. Like cells rallying against a disease or distributing resources. Navigation, for me, (and I expect for most people) involves these individual, almost intimate networks of mnemonics made by us, for us. Following streets and directions is a simplified abstraction of this, generalizing it to the point that it can be followed by anyone. Nobody tells you to walk down the street with the hat shop on your left side until you see the two mattresses with BUGS carved into them with a box cutter or go to the stairs outside the big green spire. Landmarks, unless they are unambiguous (the CN Tower, the big green door), are generally lost on an individual because no two people find the same geographical features, for lack of a better word, interesting.

Communication, in all of its forms, is starting to feel just like that. What you think and what you say or write are rarely the same things (it’s not like it was in my head), and how it’s interpreted is never the same as it was fully intended. Hardly a new idea, sure, but not one without meat. It’s the thing that can make each conversation land somewhere between a sublime experience (That’s interesting, it reminds me of…) and an exercise in browbeating frustration (don’t end your sentences in a preposition). Everything is abstracted, compressed, simplified, conveyed, expanded, processed, and mutated. Each encounter builds on those before it, a procedure that could conceivably build the entire concept of taste.

Depending on your objective, making this process work for you in some way is key. A technical writer has to be obsessive about detail while omitting anything that dilutes the clarity of the message, where a fiction writer needs gaps to for the reader to fill with their own experiences, to put themselves in the text.
Instructions are directions, intended to be heeded verbatim with hopes that both the writer and reader will meet their objectives, conversations, poetry, and prose encourage the reader to get lost, to explore parts of themselves and those around them they may not otherwise have considered.

Now: