The Map and the Territory
I had a dream the other night where I was driving while looking at the map on my phone. Every once and a while I’d be overwhelmed by a sense that I would hit something or run off the road so I would take my eyes off the phone and look out the windshield, but I just couldn’t stop focusing on the map. Overall it was a weird and disorienting feeling. I do not recommend driving like this!
Lately I’ve been trying to pay closer attention to my dreams to see what they may be telling me. I tend to think of my dreams as either too incoherent or mundane to have anything meaningful to offer. I mean come on, driving down Southern California roads while staring at google maps?! I listened to a podcast recently by a Jungian psychologist who was saying that dreams are not so much to be “interpreted” for meaning as they are to be contemplated. Don’t try to decipher what a particular element of the dream represents but just contemplate on the images in the dream. How do they make you feel and what ideas do they bring up?
So I started to do just that and kind of meditated on the images in my head from this dream. Pretty quickly an insight arose. I’ve been trying to read the map of my own future, sometimes giving that precedence over the road in front of me. What am I called to do in this life? How might that align with what I am doing now? What transitions might need to occur to get me from here to that calling. I spend a lot of time thinking about this and trying to summon a map I can follow. What I felt like this dream was saying is that my future lies right in front of me. It will arise on its own and when I experience it, I will experience it right now in the present instant. By focusing on a map, I miss what is actually unfolding right in front of me. So focus on that.
My worldview, particularly in regards to how I feel the future unfolds, has dramatically changed in the past few years. I used to think we are all on our own, we make the choices we make, and in combination with the choices other people are making, the future unravels itself into the present. So good luck! While I absolutely still think that we all create our futures based on our choices and actions, I now think there is a hand that guides us. I think there is a sort of plan which that hand moves us along and our suffering is impacted by how we either surrender to or resist that hand. Its super hard to articulate all of this because I think this is all surrounded by incomprehensible nuance and unknowable mystery that simply cannot be captured in a two sentence statement. Just suffice it to say that I don’t believe in utter chaos or random cosmic anarchy.
So if there is a deeper meaning to what transpires in our life, if there is a destiny that God has in store for us, do we need to worry so much about the map? Throughout my adult life, even in my most atheistic years, I would sometimes open my inner ears for guidance when I felt totally lost or even just a bit confused. The guidance I almost always receive is “keep moving forward…just keep moving forward.” There is love and peace behind the guidance that gives me hope, sometimes in the midst of despair. I just need to show up and put forth my best effort right here, right now. I can’t see what lies on the other side of the mountain, but I know I need to climb the mountain.
There is a freedom to surrendering the map and allowing ourselves to truly experience what is in front of us now. I also think that a map can still be helpful and that we are often given signs that point us in the direction we are meant to move. These signs are gifts and they can be intuitive insights, a desire, comments from friends, or a passage from scripture. I am pretty sure they don’t come any more abundantly by obsessing over them. We simply need to be open and receptive to the hand that draws us forward and follow that pull.
