Explore the Map

Learning a new skill is much like exploring a new landscape. Sometimes you know just enough to safely navigate it and get from point A to point B. Sometimes you know it so intimately that you can detect small changes in rock, or notice that a plant has grown or a tree has fallen. The larger and more complex the skill, the larger and more complex the landscape. Previous travelers are often available as educators about each area. Teaching us how to safely interact with them and navigate them can save us time from being lost in there or even worse, having that landscape consume us. I have always liked getting lost and knowing an area intimately.This likely originates from my childhood pastime of wandering in the woods of new england. Those woods are dense and it takes time and skill to know where you are and which direction you're headed. Just as I spent a long time in those woods, in the mile stretch between my house and the local reservoir, I’ve spent a long time exploring one skill, how to be strong, or more specifically, how to squat, bench, and deadlift as much as I can with the aid of multiply equipment. Unlike the woods of New England, it is very easy to know if you have “gone off trail” on this map sheet. You can get real time daily and weekly feedback about your progress and understanding the path you must take. The further along you get the steeper the walls of the cliff on either side become and all you can explore is right in front of you and all you can see is nothing to your left and right. In this void, one day, I decided to leave. Reasons aside, I putty head down and ran out of that dessert canyon back into an entirely new landscape. I had traveled in this landscape briefly so I remembered some of the tools of navigation, but via outside educators and taking my time in these new areas I began to explore again. It was exciting to see and feel new things. In this new landscape I wasn’t trapped. I could visit the mountains, cycle the roads, and run in the hills, all while being about to return to the outskirts of the desert to feel the dry heat and run my hands over the steel knurled rocks.

Now, nearly two years since I have turned and run, I am faced with the need to spend time in the desert to regain some of what I once had. I don’t need to walk the canyon, but I need time there to strengthen myself against the other landscapes. I find myself in this place, lost again, a strange feeling as I am a paid guide in this terrain and continue to show others how to safely navigate it. I have lost the ability to navigate it myself, I can only visit and stare in awe at what others have done with it, both magnificent and terrible. Like the woods behind my house I am stuck attending to my steps as I relearn to desert walk in between my days in the woods and mountains, also learning their nuanced navigation. I tell myself it is better to know all these spaces, as this makes for a better life full of more experiences, more than that one desert canyon can offer.

Through educator or self-will, explore your world, and mark your map, making it easier to return and easier to safely pass through. It may have been this fear of being lost that had me convinced that the cave in the desert canyon was the best place to live. Now I wander more than I ever before; I am lost more than ever before; I am happier than I ever was in the desert. There is room in all these new wonderful spaces to see the world around me. There is room to be lost and explore the map.