And I don’t mean that pejoratively because that’s also what my writing & teaching is – drawing from tradition and dead people (also living people), making maps from metaphors, and making meaning from maps.
I don’t think you’re “foolish” at all to look for meaning in experience. Finding meaning, making maps – I have found these incredibly helpful. Also fun. I do love me some lovely language & stimulating theory to help guide my life! [I remember being a teenager and wondering if there was an adult job where you get to sit around and talk about ideas with friends and now I think I did sort of manifest a life of map making 😮!!]
AND, I have to constantly remind myself about the limits of maps. How I talk
about something is not the thing itself. Also, how I talk about something can never match your experience of it.
Because all of this could become a dissertation-length email, imma really try to keep this succinct (wish me luck!). Also, beware, the following act of writing is itself my personal map making…
In My Experience… I use different traditions, systems, tools, and ultimately, language itself to navigate my challenges; yet, at times, I get caught up in the cartography by thinking that, if I could simply discover or invent it, I could uncover a right route (or a destination at all) — ultimately, simply enjoying existence gets me exactly where I need to be, which is always right here.
I find maps to be informative. And beautiful. I have a gigantic world map in my kitchen. It’s over six feet tall and nine feet wide and allows me to see small countries and the tiniest of islands. It’s enhanced my understanding of our globe and I get lost in time staring at it. Obviously, it is not a substitute for the places it names.
For decades, I studied Buddhist maps of the mind which I found to be incredible guides for steering attention and cultivating awareness. As well, I have come to understand myself through various typologies including the Enneagram, Numerology, and Astrology. Exploring patterns that stem from my ancestral and karmic conditioning is also a kind of map making. For years, personal maps in the form of narratives I create through therapy, creative expression, and simply sharing/shaping my story with friends and guides have too been central to my meaning making… All of this has been useful to me.
I’ve also gone overboard in almost every single tradition & technique I just named – thinking that I would find an ultimate map or meaning to my life. I was very into lists. Lots of lists…
The map is not the territory.
Back when I used to create coaching plans, quite a few times I included for clients who were map-reliant (takes one to know one) a one-paragraph very short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called "On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" ("Del rigor en la ciencia"). It tells the story of a fictional kingdom where the science of cartography – making maps – was so perfect that only maps that were the exact size of the area they depicted were thought good enough. Here it is in full, as translated by Andrew Hurley.
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
— Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
They say we teach what we need to learn. 🙃
Of course, any attempts I have made to utilize such totalizing, point for point maps have been as disastrous as described here. Useless, really. Partly because they’re based on other people’s maps and mostly because they cover over my actual living of life. I can be so busy trying to match my experience to an idea of what I should be experiencing (a plotting or progression or perfection) that I am no longer experiencing what is in fact happening but what I believe should be happening or an interpretation of it.
Ultimately, I must engage with my own emergent, ever-changing, process–map which is made of moment by moment, breath by breath living. It's not that those other maps aren't helpful, but they're not really the point.
I was just speaking to my wise friend Vicky about this and she likened it to collaging or any artistic process. She said, “the patterns reveal themselves as you’re creating it.” And often, words and meaning fail. There's simply beauty or color or texture. There's movement and rhythm and sensation… There's a life.
So, you asked me what I imagine is the meaning of my suffering, wondering if I even do make meaning of it. I do. And it's hard to name it here because it is continually shifting. So, I guess it's meanings, plural. I believe I will never be able to name one, exact meaning. I believe that my ongoing map making is changing previous meanings, even as it shapes new ones.
I’ll end with the closing words from Joy Harjo’s poem “A Map to the Next World” and hope that we may, each of us, continue to make our own maps.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
