All of you must have heard the phrase “Common sense is not common”, what about direction sense?? . For a long time I never used to be enthusiastic to drive to any new place. I just thought I didn’t like driving. It took a while for me to figure out the real reason. It is my direction sense. Let me quote a small incident in my life to explain this.
When I was young, I don’t remember the exact age, our family went on a tour to Delhi. We stayed at our mom’s sister’s house( Thank you periamma (aunt)and periappa (uncle) for letting us stay in your house ). We traveled by a train from Chennai to New Delhi and reached New Delhi around night time. Next day when we woke up my mom wanted to have coffee. She cannot start her day without coffee, seeing my dad and brother sleeping she asked me to accompany her to get some milk. Both of us don’t know the language they speak there (Hindi). My mom can understand the language a little bit, but not much. Since we did not understand any boards or signs and the apartment we stayed had very identical blocks around, we could not find anything as a landmark. So on our way we saw a cow tied to a pole and we had that as our landmark to come back home ,after so much of struggle and asking people around with the little Hindi we knew we reached the milk booth (People who know about my Hindi will know the struggle I went through). After getting milk we didn’t know how to get back home. By then the cow we had as landmark was taken away somewhere else, we were lost. There were no mobile phones then, we again started to ask people around and finally reached home. I clearly remember this incident , by the time we reached home my father and brother were very worried about what happened to us.The main problem was our direction sense and new place.
For a long time I thought all women have this problem until I found some of my girl friends and colleague’s who have extraordinary direction sense and will know the direction even when they have been to a place only once . Even today I have this problem, it is hard for me to connect the dots and imagine the map. I can go to work and all grocery stores that I usually go without GPS but for all new places I need a GPS for sure.Some people say they go by the sun to know north,south,east west. Please help me on how to improve my direction sense and also please share your thoughts on this and let me know about your direction sense. I want to know the answer to the question “is direction sense common?” .