Direction

I often stop in my tracks and ask myself, "OK, what's next?" This is a symptom of my running in circles and getting nowhere. It is a cue for me to meditate more, rest and listen my inner voice more carefully. 

My subjective sense of progress in my life is often at odds with the objective reality reflected to me by a friend. This is one of the best advantages to form and develop honest friendships. "Where are you going with this?" can be the most caring question to ask a friend who seems to be traveling headlong on obsessive automatic. It can prevent a nasty collision against a well-established stone wall. 

I realize now that my only defined direction is to aging and death. Everything else is up for grabs. This is why I base my direction at any given time on my practice of humanist values and health maintenance. I have set my priorities for daily living from which to operate on my journey.

I am stunned by the current trend of intelligent people becoming entirely dependent on GPS devices to get from Point A to Point B. I confess deep amusement whenever a GPS devotee gets entirely lost on the way to meeting me somewhere. It happens quite often. I recently advised a student, new to Boston, to sit down with a printed or on line map of the city and to study it for an hour after he told me he managed to go unintentionally to Framingham, a distance west of 20 miles, when trying to go from the Fenway to Malden, a distance northeast of 5 miles, with the aid of his GPS device. 

If I am incapable of taking the time and mental skill to thoughtfully plot my course from concrete Point A to concrete Point B, how will I develop the capacity to direct my life through the more nebulous courses ahead? Will I eventually need an app to tell me when to eat and sleep? This would be regressive and infantilizing, wouldn't it? 

Learning to understand my own mind and emotions through practice is a form of internal cartography. Any direction I choose to an objective is never a linear path. It is an ever-changing route through a shifting, multidimensional, internal landscape. Without a map of me in hand, I can get lost all too easily.