‘It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out on a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognise a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighbouring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned around - for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost - do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.’

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (The Village).