Wayfinding, The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. This is a fascinating book. It is fun to read but also highly relevant to me in multiple ways.

Wayfinding, orienting ourselves, is an old skill providing an evolutionary advantage. Our brains are evolved for it with cells that fire in distinct places, to mark boundaries, for head directions, in recognition of landmarks or in grids at different levels of resolution. They allow us to build cognitive maps of our world. How we navigate and what happens when we get lost and fear grips us impacting quality of decisions is however just the beginning.

The book brings together recent research on the connection between our navigational skills, cognition of abstract concepts and mental decline due to aging. Reading it renewed my urgency to do more with Systems Convening in our work, helped me think about my mental health, and about physical fitness w.r.t. aging and dementia, something that runs in the family.

I picked this book up last May in an independent book store in Utrecht, Steven Sterk. Burn-out and depression are akin to being lost, and it’s why this book jumped out at me browsing the book store.

Read it over summer, and have now finished transcribing my annotations from the many post-its I added to the book’s pages. Some 6000 words in total.

The book Wayfinding next to a large pile of post-its with annotations that I removed from the book after transcribing them into my notes.