Inner Compass: Finding My Way Home in the Age of GPS

These excursions coursed the very real and sometimes bumpy roads of human interaction, from which we learned to draft our own internal maps, in time.

Family road trip: memories in the making. gorillaimages/Shutterstock

If you run a needle through your hair 100 times, the needle will take on a magnetic charge. Then you can find a leaf, and set it gently on the surface of a pool of water. Ever more gently, so as not to sink the leaf, you can place the needle on top. In the absence of wind, the heavy end of the needle, with the eye, will align itself to the magnetic north.

From there, you can chart your course. If, that is, you find yourself lost, without a compass or a GPS.