Learning to Use a Compass

For my 50 th birthday last year a friend of mine gave me a compass, a really beautiful one encased in wood with inlay. I have kept it on my bedside table for over a year. I haven't actually really used the compass so much for its most fundamental job (navigating). Rather, it reminds me that there is always a way to know which direction I am going. I sometimes forget where I'm going, both in the earthly, material sense (I came downstairs to get something--what was it again?) as well as in the internal or spiritual sense. And I often get lost (just ask my daughter), or lose myself, especially when I'm in a new neighborhood.

I decided to bring a compass on my trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Not the beautiful one I received as a gift (it was back home in Meadville, I was leaving from Minneapolis anyway), but a standard camping compass that also had a flashlight (very useful, especially since the small "torch" I bought for my trip didn't work for some reason--I have such trouble with flashlights). I took it because my guidebook recommended a compass as many of the descriptions of the temples I was planning on visiting used North, South, East, and West as guidelines to orient the tourist. For that, it actually was helpful.

It was also helpful to me in navigating roads. Try as I may, I was unable to find a particularly good map of the area. The best I good do was the maps in the Siem Reap tourist guide. These maps had some streets listed, but not many. It turned out that didn't matter so much because I rarely saw street signs anyway. There were a few in the Old Market/tourist section of town, and a few on the other side of the river where I was staying, but really, very few. And once I got out of town on my bike on the way to see a temple, this was especially true. It seemed like there was the main roadway (two lanes largely once out of town), and then there were smaller sometimes paved roads, most mostly gravely dirt roads, many of which wouldn't accomodate a car, or at least not much of one.  I loved traveling on these back roads, which I did with Sum on our trips to the temples. I did gain some confidence (or lacked good sense, depending on your point of view!) and rode on some back roads on my last day when I visited the Rolous temples, which were about 15-20 km from Siem Reap. It was longer if you took the back roads, and still longer if you missed your "exit" (i.e., got lost), both of which I did. But I had such fun on those roads, feeling intrepid without really being in any danger (I could always go back the way I came, retrace my steps--I was in no hurry and there just weren't that many roads to get lost on in the end it seemed to me at the time-oh folly!). It was a good example of, as one friend refers to it, "mildly adverse conditions."

The road on the way back from Bakong temple.

Some friends (and a number of strangers for that matter) have wondered at my taking such a trip on my own and riding a bike on strange roads (with no helmet often, sorry dad, just not the culture there). I honestly didn't feel particularly courageous or bold, or even scared or nervous (except that one night when I was on my bike and really not sure if I was heading the right direction, at which point I really didn't have that much time, nor could I retrace my steps since I was returning a different way than I had gone out in the morning). It all felt like I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing, going exactly in the direction I needed to be going, though I wasn't always sure where exactly that was geographically. It seemed, mysteriously even to me, all to be perfectly and easily just as it should.

I know I've posted this quotation before (from the Daily Dharma, Tricycle Magazine), but it bears repeating, and reminding.

Whatever your difficulties—a devastated heart, financial loss, feeling assaulted by the conflicts around you, or a seemingly hopeless illness—you can always remember that you are free in every moment to set the compass of your heart to your highest intentions. In fact, the two things that you are always free to do—despite your circumstances—are to be present and to be willing to love.

- Jack Kornfield, "Set the Compass of Your Heart"