Time To Become A Cartographer
- S. A.Gibbs
- Jan 15, 2017
- 3 min read
Adulthood is an insidious process of accretion. If you’re not vigilant, you begin to grow a shell, a carapace that you are expected to carry lightly: the rigid, high-stress hull of security, status, status quo. The thicker the better, right up until it crushes you. On the inside, whether you can still feel it or not, your soul is trying to claw its way out.
Mark Jenkins, The Hard Way
I often wonder what the difference is between fact and fiction. I mean, if there is a difference, why is there so much disagreement on so many issues? Shouldn’t it just come down to collecting and understanding the facts, and then acting based on these facts? What it comes down to is that each and every one of us navigate through our lives using different maps, our mental maps. Our mental maps are drafted by a myriad of influences including our nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, education, family, and work experiences. In effect, our mental maps provide the filters through which we view life, including all those facts I referenced. These mental maps give us the context through which we try make sense of life; they are the ballast that keeps our ships upright, our personal source of predictability and stability. As an old Marine friend of mine likes to say, “how’s that working for you?”
Peter Korn explains in his book “Why We Make Things and Why it Matters”, our failure to recalibrate our mental maps in the face of reality frequently renders us as text-book examples of cognitive dissonance. This is when there is a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what we say and what we do, what we profess to believe in and how we live our lives. Instead of making these necessary recalibrations, we rest instead on our moral certitudes all the while knowing that something is out of balance, a source for the angst that sends so many people into anxiety free-falls. So when the world behaves in a way that we expect based on our mental maps, we are happy, or so we think. One thing is for certain, there’s always tomorrow and the proverbial shit will hit the fan. What becomes obvious is that happiness is ephemeral. There must be a better way.
Korn states that our mental maps not only frame our experience of reality; they actually shape reality, because they guide us as we interact with the world. It appears to me that more than ever, we need to become life cartographers and redraw our mental maps so that the courses we set in our travels are more fully rooted in our quest for fulfillment, not happiness. Now that we are in our second phase of life, we should know what peaks, valleys and rivers are mirages; all we have to do is look back through our lives and in our hearts to remember the lessons learned. Changing our mental maps may create the feeling of instability and unpredictability, but if we're honest with ourselves, it never was that stable and predictable to begin with. Are you willing to travel the remainder of your life on a tour bus, or are you prepared to be the explorer you were put on this planet to be? Land Ho! Or is it?
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