Heroes Not Zombies

We humans are sense making creatures. We don’t just see, we notice and we observe. We are primed to see patterns, to create associations between the different elements in a scene, to create narratives out of our experiences, weaving together the threads of events into rich unique tapestries of meaning.

We use certain patterns again and again, calling them up to see how well they fit the latest experience or scene. Maps are a particular class of such patterns. We use maps to see where we are, where we’ve come from, where we might go, and how we might get there.

Dan Siegel, the author of Mindsight, describes how, amongst many other things, we use our frontal lobes (the parts of the brain just behind the forehead) to create three kinds of map – a “me” map, a “you” map and a “we” map as we create a sense of self, recognise others and know what to expect in any particular relationship.

There are often times in a life history when we feel lost. Not lost geographically perhaps, but not knowing who we are, where we are in our singular story, or where that story is heading. It’s at times like that we might need both a map and a guide….someone who can help us see more clearly the answers to those questions.

I think there are two important things to remember about all this – “the map is not the territory” ie our maps are abstractions, created from only some of the possible elements of reality. Our life story, for example, can look very different depending on how much weight we give to certain events, something which allows us the possibility of creating a more satisfying story if we want to. And, the map is never complete. We can never see THE destination because the road ahead is being created as we live it.

Maps are really helpful but we should never see them as fixed, absolute “truths”.