Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass Book

It does what the title says, as written by a navigator and aviation pioneer. It's more of a compendium of tips for divining direction through observation of wind direction, snow melt, anthill orientation (!), and other oddities only absorbed through years of action. It's a plea for mindfulness of one's environment, which I need to remember as a viable alternative to stuffing earbuds in my head during a walk or run.

Plenty of his advice is outdated ("[during a transcontinental flight] I found that it was much easier to tell the wind direction on Mondays than on any other day by watching the clotheslines, for Monday is wash day the world over") but the principle holds eternal: Look around you and you'll learn to orient yourself in space.

Not all of us can be Darwins, but all of us can be constructive potterers, all of us can go for walks with no purpose in view but that of watching, of observation, of developing the use of the senses we are born with, of arousing thought and stimulating the imagination, of awakening the creative faculties. Everything becomes more meaningful to him who watches and listens without too much thought to the value of his time.