Last year I started up a little horse grooming service, which has me driving to small farms all over 4 counties in Kentucky.  You’d think that in this day of MapQuest and Google Maps, directions wouldn’t really be much of an issue.  

Well, those map apps tend to be citified to the point where too much country air and a lot of unnamed gravel roads render them a trifle indisposed. 

You'd also think nobody would actually say things like, “Take the first right turn past where they tore down that blue shed last year.”  Or the more precisely quantitative, yet less visible to the naked eye, “Our turnoff is 3.26 miles after the underground house.”

Directions are an issue.

But I like to take a Zen approach, especially to that overused gem:  If you come to the such-and-such, you’ve gone too far.  I mean, that’s basically how life works!  You do your best to move along your path, looking hard for signs that may or may not be easy to see, and turning back when you think you passed up what you’re looking for. 

And when going Zen doesn’t work, my default tactic is to let the whole subject remind me of how my father used to love it when a stranger asked him for directions.  He would look reassuringly at the stranger as the destination was described, nodding his head slightly the whole time, and then he’d think on it for a couple of seconds before saying, “Yeah, you can’t get there from here.”