Falling Off Your Map Into The Realm Of Infinite Possibility
When you’ve outgrown the familiar terrain, sometimes all that’s left to do is jump.
You might make the choice with full intention and awareness, you may get shoved off when you least expect it or you may just stumble and fall.
However it happens, when you’ve outlived your current map of life, it’s likely you may find yourself at the edge, with nowhere else to go… but off.
Why? Because real life begins where your map ends.
For a big part of my life I lived on the same, familiar, well-trodden map. I knew the rules and the consequences of not following them. I knew the pathways to work and home which were also the pathways to security and safety. The map was where it’s at. It helped me to have control over my life.
I was always inquisitive and took some risks but they were still well within the confines of a modern day map. At the beginning they were the usual big life shifts of moving out of home for the first time, getting a full-time job, becoming fully responsible for myself, buying my first piece of furniture, even travelling overseas (without phone or e-mail back then) was still colouring between the lines so to speak.
I was still making a lot of my decisions from my mind map of what I thought was OK or the right thing to do.
What’s interesting, as I sit here attempting to finish this article, is that I can still feel the old map trying to laying itself over my experience, when I chose to jump off it some time ago now. It’s like writing about it has brought it back.
I’ve been trying to write from my mind and what it thinks it knows about this topic rather than getting out of the way (jumping off that map) and allowing what you need to read to flow through.
Jumping… now!
The thing is there are the two-dimensional kinds of maps that we get told about and then there are the multi-dimensional maps that we create and traverse that gives life a whole new level of meaning and experience.
You can have an ordinary structured life vs. an extraordinary mythopoetic life.
Maps require tools for navigating and the old mental maps that I speak of are limited to what we already know. After a while swimming in the known becomes… well just boring.
Jumping off this map for me has looked like traversing up the caverns of old neural pathways, walking the plank and spring-boarding (with a clumsy swan dive) down into the depths of infinite wisdom and knowing… into my body.
My physical body that senses, attunes and responds to the stimulants of its environment (outer and inner). Finely tuned receptors that absorb, digest and inform.
My feeling body who is alive with the energy and information that is in constant flow through the language of anger, sadness, fear and joy.
My energy body that can direct its attention to anything it chooses and where attention goes is where energy flows. Magic happens here, way beyond what the mind can comprehend.
When these maps layer with the mental body’s capacity to process, rationalise, problem solve and think you can find yourself in a kind of mapless map. A free fall where the unknown is your landscape, deep inner knowing is your parachute and trust is your navigating system.
Trust in your multi-faceted self to be able to navigate all of the maps, hence rendering them all irrelevant. From this position, the maps become less about finding work and home for security and safety and more about guides for curiosity, wonder and exploration.
Almost like the map appears when you take your next step into the void; a co-creation of sorts.
Because when you trust yourself enough to jump off the familiar maps, and delve into the world of cartography you become the creator of your own life. The maps no longer dictate which way to go… you do.
Stacia
