An older friend, Allan, who lives part-time in New York City, was telling me how young people walking the streets keep asking him for directions, with their GPS in their hands. One young man couldn’t figure out how to get to 7th Avenue from his GPS. Allan said they often didn’t have clue – felt lost. I suggested he give them a quick lesson in basic directions – that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. He thought I was joking but I wasn’t. New York is laid on on a north/south, east/west grid pattern. The numbers rise from east to west and downtown to uptown. To use the sun brings a touch of nature and our place in it, if we use it to orient ourselves. Feeling oriented is a very fundamental and calming sensation. Using the sun also make you look up, out to something larger, rather than down at a man-made device. And it is always there -doesn’t have to be charged.
— by Susan Eirich, PhD —
