It’s easy to get lost if you don’t pay attention to where you are going. This is a bad habit of mine.
I am especially prone to lostness if I am out in the world with a friend or my children. I might be the one driving the car, but I don’t usually focus much on where I parked the car. It seems like it should just be good enough to have found a parking spot, right?
You might understand this if you have ever shopped at the Roseville Costco (or possibly any Costco, really). The parking lot there is so stressful that even finding a spot feels like victory. Because if you managed to get there by navigating the terrible freeway and the even worse freeway off-ramp and the diabolical left turn lanes into Costco, you should just be able to relax and not have to think about where you ended up in that massive, hellish parking lot. Generally, forgetting where the car is parked is not a huge dealio, because whoever I am with remembers. This is one of the nice things about parenting teenagers and young adults. They tend to notice things like this.
We made it home from my son’s college orientation this week. They had two days of helpful information sessions for parents and incoming students. He got to spend the night in the dorms, register for classes, and eat in the dining hall. I got to share meals and some activities with him. We made it to Santa Barbara by 7:45 am, found Parking Garage 22, which was the assigned parking garage for our session, and followed the directions of the helpful student workers who were stationed right outside the garage to locate the check-in area.
There were student workers everywhere! They guided us from the check-in area to the auditorium where the first presentations were. Then they guided us back to the dining hall. Later, they guided us to the next venue. They kept this up for both days of our sessions.
I am a very good follower of helpful student workers.
Until I realized as the day was ending that I wasn’t exactly sure where I had parked the car in Parking Garage 22.
And since my son was spending the night in the dorms and I was driving back to the hotel, I was on my own. Surprisingly, they did not have a helpful student worker posted to remind me of where I had parked in the parking garage thirteen hours earlier. This was unfortunate.
I got lucky.
I honestly had no clear picture of where the car was; I hadn’t thought about it at all in our hurry to get parked and checked in that morning. Somehow, though, I managed to find it anyway, with a minimal amount of stress. I had a little stress finding the parking garage itself, though. Because I hadn’t paid attention to where we were in the morning when we first arrived. And it had started to get dark. And the campus has numerous parking garages. And the helpful student workers who had been guiding us around all day had gone home.
The next day, I parked in the same parking garage, but made a point to think about where I was. I noted the floor I was on. I went down the stairs and took pictures of the buildings across the street and noticed the landmarks. Surprisingly, I was in a different section of the garage from where we parked the first day; I hadn’t realized that as I was driving in. I exited the garage through a different door from the day before. All this was necessary information because my son would be coming home with me at the end of his orientation day, and I was the only one who knew where I had parked.
I was proud of myself, though. I even did a little bit of navigating on my own that day. I found the path to the beach and sat by myself on the sand for a bit. I made my way back to the dining hall where I met my son for lunch. I walked to Isla Vista, a community right outside of campus. It was good to have the helpful student guides, but by the end, I was managing OK, too. Once I made a point not to be distracted. Once I remembered that I was capable of navigating new places on my own, that all I had to do was simply pay attention. And by the way? At the end of the day when it was time to finally head home? I knew exactly where the car was.
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