Navigating life with the right map

Neil McKenty

One day on my radio phone-in show the question was, “How do you get on with your mate driving the car?” Most of the callers, especially the women, recalled incidents where their husbands got lost. The reaction was always the same. First the husband denied he was lost, then he refused to stop the car and ask for directions and finally, in a fit of pique, he angrily refused to look at a map.

That radio program got me thinking about maps. Of course, if you’re lost it’s stupid not to consult a map and figure out where you are. But suppose you don’t have a map. Or even worse, you have the wrong map.

For example, you live in Montreal and for the first time you are motoring to Boston. You get to Boston alright, then the whole trip begins to unravel. You can’t find your hotel. You can’t even find the name of the street your hotel is on. You pore over your map. None of it makes any sense.

Finally, you see a policeman. You stop and show him your map. He looks at you quizzically. He says it’s no wonder you’re lost. You’ve been driving frantically around Boston using the map of Detroit.

But isn’t that how some people go through life, following the wrong map? Is it any wonder that so many are anxious, bewildered, angry and ultimately lost? Of course, now we're talking about an interior map, a map that somehow relates to the landscape of our own psyche. So where do we get this inaccurate, defective map that has led us down so many blind alleys? I think the answer is that we get this map from other people. Perhaps our parents gave us a map that applies more to their needs than to ours. Or we spend a lot of energy trying to live up to the expectations (the maps) of other people.

At the core of the problem is an instinctive sense that we are not being true to ourselves, that we are not living out our natural bent, nor, in the words of Joseph Campbell “following our bliss.” Instead our lives are still governed by external expectations — by these maps drawn by other people.

Think of the tortuous journey of a man who wants to be a writer but instead, living up to his family’s aspirations, has become a priest. Or a woman who wants to be an artist but finds herself doing a degree in bioethics because that’s what her father, an eminent doctor, wanted her to do.

I think the word “hypocrite” is relevant here, not in a moral sense, but from the Greek root meaning “actor”. It’s a dreadful burden to go through life being an actor, following the wrong map.

So how does a person develop his or her own map for the journey? My own experience is that a crisis of some sort may be required to get us on the road to existential honesty. Some of us must hit what AA calls an “emotional bottom” wherein we realize that (with the wrong map) we are powerless, that our lives have become unmanageable and we must reach out for help. It is in this “bottom” that I believe we take the first decisive step in beginning to draw our own map.

It is a marvellous paradox that when we become vulnerable we also become able to grow from the inside. In that sense, God does indeed write straight with crooked lines. Or as the Canadian therapist Marian Woodman puts it, “God comes through the wound.”

There's a type of litmus test to tell whether one lives by one's own map. First, a friend telephones and ask you to a party. You say you’ll get back to her. The reason for your delay is not to consult your agenda. The real reason is that you don’t want to commit yourself in case another more interesting invitation might turn up. Only those who habitually live outside of their own maps are mature enough not to continually hedge their bets but to move in a straight line. Another friend invites you to take on a project. You hesitantly say yes not because the project interests you but because you don’t want to offend your friend. You're not living on your own map. Only those who do so are comfortable saying no when it is the mature response. How and why a person says no says a lot.

Drawing your own maps is not a decision nor an act of will. It's a process which requires awareness, demands patience and is truly liberating.

Blessings on your journey.