Finding Yourself is a Privilege, but Being Permitted to Begin that Journey is a Right

It’s time we give adoptees what is rightfully theirs

Watching Disney’s Moana with my son the other day, I was struck by something the character Maui says, after he has admonished Moana for not understanding how to navigate the ocean. He says:

“It’s called wayfinding, princess. It’s seeing where you are going in your mind. Knowing where you are, by knowing where you’ve been.”

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

The Internal Compass

Wayfinding seems to have originated with the Polynesians, who mastered it in ways that make our GPS-dependent culture seem simplistic and infantile. They used stars, wave patterns, currents, and winds to locate islands thousands of miles away and return to them time and time again, without the use of physical maps or computerized navigation. Today, wayfinding more generally refers to how organisms orient themselves in physical space and move from one location to another. Ants, for example, use wayfinding in ways not too dissimilar from the Polynesians, insofar as they have been shown to modify their movements based on landmarks and they get disoriented if those landmarks are altered or removed. In other words, as Maui says, they figure out where they are going by remembering where they…