The path is the goal! So said Confucius, who lived more than 2500 years ago. But as often as I heard this wisdom, I neither understood nor believed it for a long time, because in my youth I always had a destination in mind - a sports field, for example, to play soccer with friends, which in turn was linked to a goal, namely to kick the ball into the opponent's goal.
I wasn't interested in the route, even if it was possible to go past an ice cream parlor, for example, which could also be done on the way back and was more fun if you had won. Nevertheless, in the 1960s, socio-political thinkers began to draw up an intellectual map of life, and the goal that I had always understood personally became the great meaning of life, which could only be found by philosophizing. Confucius became fashionable. But regardless of this, the practical problem of getting from here to there remained in everyday life, i.e. finding a destination in a landscape or a meeting point in a city.
It was necessary to find one's way around the world and solve the task called navigation, which was entrusted to a device that guided one to the entered destination. As long as such marvels were not available, you had to use the marvel in your head called the brain, and as neuroscience has recently (digitally) discovered, evolution has equipped humans with a wealth of spatial orientation skills that allow us to explore our living space and find our way back after reaching a destination, i.e. something edible or lovable, something that guarantees survival. Evolution has provided humans with a wealth of neurons in their heads that they can train in the course of their explorations, ultimately allowing them the navigation that individuals need for their personal success in life. This is why children roam and explore forests and streams, and this is the first time I can understand Confucius.
Finding the way through the world is the goal of spatial exploration in childhood. And now comes the cell phone with GPS. You enter a destination and no longer worry about the route. This is how people lose sight of themselves. They have to get back on track. This is actually the destination.
