I’ve been a Scout leader for most of the time since 1992. When I was 18, I led a team of Scouts on a week-long hike across Dartmoor for my Queen’s scout award, using proper old-fashioned maps and compasses — the sort with soggy corners and pencil marks from a dozen previous trips. We even used “leap-frog” navigation in thick fog, where you take turns pacing out distances and guiding each other forward through the mist. Over the years I’ve planned many hikes and taught Cubs and Scouts how to find their way using map and compass, the stars, the sun and the moon.
Navigation has always felt second nature to me — until it suddenly wasn’t.
Two incidents that happened not long after my first treatments made me realise that something fundamental had changed in how my brain handled space and direction. The first was so simple it shouldn’t have been a problem at all. My co-Scout leader gave me two quick directions to follow in town — turn left, then right, over about fifty metres. By the time I’d made the left turn, the second instruction had completely evaporated. I stood there blankly, trying to recall what came next. It dawned on me that I was going to have to face the embarrassment of finding him again and admitting my predicament.
The second incident came on a night hike with the Scouts. We were following a route card that another leader had prepared. Each leg of the route was neatly written on its own row, including a compass bearing and distance to the end point of one leg serving as the start of the next — a perfectly sensible shortcut. But when I looked down the card, that missing repetition of the start point threw me completely. I couldn’t reconcile how we were meant to begin the next leg, and for the first time in decades of hiking, I found myself unable to lead the way.
It sounds ludicrous. It was a sobering moment. With a dozen Scouts in my care, I realised that although there were always other adults with us, I could no longer be relied upon as the main navigator. It wasn’t about losing confidence — it was about recognising a genuine change in ability and learning to adapt.
Even now, years later, I still find that sense of direction elusive. But I try to see it not as a failure, but as another kind of challenge — one that calls for different tools, new strategies, and a little extra patience.
Related strategies : phone and watch apps, “Give me directions home”, phone home, repetition, use point features, not lines, Related insights — damage to parietal lobe, mental rotation. remember old stomping grounds better. Related challenges — rooms in house, more to come…
Half a Mind to .. 
Leave a comment