019: When the world felt smaller
Embodied memory in a digital age
There was a time when we knew where we were, not just on a map, but in the world itself, through the subtle language of sun and shadow, the familiar curve of a street corner, the unmistakable scent drifting from a corner bakery just after a familiar turn. To orient oneself was not a conscious task but a gentle unfolding, a weaving into place that happened naturally, because the world demanded it.
Our memories held these details as effortlessly as breathing. Phone numbers of family members and childhood friends were never forced into mind like facts but lived as a quiet pulse beneath daily living. Today, many of us hesitate when asked to recite our own numbers, fingertips searching absentmindedly for devices that contain the answers we once carried. This is not a lament for lost convenience, but an acknowledgment of the subtle shifts in how we inhabit our own experience of place and self.
Before the blue dot on a glowing screen, before voice assistants recalibrated our routes, the knowledge of place was intimately physical. To lose one’s way was a lesson in patience, curiosity, and openness. The path revealed itself in time, and the journey itself was as meaningful as the destination.
There was a time when the world felt smaller. Distances were not necessarily shorter, but our experience of place was fuller. Streets were remembered, faces recognized, paths learned by heart. Our sense of direction was less about satellite signals and more about the shape of the earth beneath our feet. We knew where we were not only by maps or signs but by how the light fell through trees, the hum of a neighborhood, or the scent carried on the wind.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
— Henry David Thoreau
This essay is not an elegy for the past. It is a meditation on scale: the size of things as they appear in our minds, and how that scale shapes our sense of belonging. What do we lose when every place is reachable, but no place is familiar? What do we miss when every idea is knowable, but none are lived long enough to transform us?
It is not a call to retreat, but to return, briefly and thoughtfully, to a time when the world felt close enough to notice, and small enough to care for.
The disorientation of perfect orientation
The modern promise is simple: never be lost again. Every turn anticipated, every street named, every delay accounted for by an invisible system working tirelessly beneath our fingertips. GPS offers a certainty that borders on omniscience. And yet, in this perfection, a paradox quietly emerges—we become strangers to the very ground beneath our feet.
Orientation, a word rooted in the rising sun, once meant more than just direction. It was a way to enter into conversation with the world—to feel the tilt of the earth, the shifting light, the gentle whisper of wind. It was a bodily knowing that anchored us in time and place.
Modern maps offer precise guidance, but they often speak a language distant from the body. They promise certainty, but they do not invite the wonder of discovery or the subtle joys of getting lost and found again.
The ease of digital navigation is remarkable and deeply useful. It opens new possibilities for travel, connection, and exploration. Yet it can also diminish the chance encounters, the sensory learning, the small adventures that arise when we trust the body’s own wayfinding instead of just following a screen. It is a gentle reminder that some aspects of knowing come not from perfect clarity, but from openness and curiosity.