Off the Map
- Posted by e4 on May 25th, 2008 filed in General
During a recent online discussion, I thought of an analogy that seems to fit our current situation. This is based on something that actually happened to me…
Once on a canoe trip in northern Minnesota, my group got lost among those ten thousand lakes. We kept looking at the map and looking at our surroundings, and we’d mentally force them to match, because we thought we must be going in the right direction. We kept going, and it kept becoming more obvious that we were way off track, but we kept making what we saw fit what was on the map. Finally, we found ourselves at the base of a ten-foot waterfall, and it became clear we were not where we thought we were. (And let me tell you, we were pretty happy to be looking up at the waterfall rather than down over it…)
But we still couldn’t get back on track until we found that waterfall on the map. We had a terrible time finding it — because it wasn’t even in Minnesota. We’d crossed over into Canada. We were inadvertently ignoring everything across that border, because well, we were in Minnesota. We were almost completely off our available map.
That’s what I see going on with the world right now. Some people are starting to think they hear a waterfall, but most people don’t because it’s not on the map. Even when you see the waterfall, it’s still a struggle to grasp exactly what your situation is. But when it finally clicks, the route you need to take becomes fairly obvious. Then the whole map makes sense again and you see exactly how you went off course.
Hopefully we don’t end up off the map completely before enough people believe they hear a waterfall…
Incidentally, on that same trip we crossed paths with another group of young campers who’d had all of their food (except one bag of cookies) eaten by bears. So I guess it could always be worse…
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