Trail Life

As a staff we've been reading through a book called Changes that Heal and talking a lot about healthy self-awareness.  I'll admit, I was skeptical of the book at first.  But it has sparked some really good discussions during our chapter debriefs each week, and there's been a lot of good content!

The chapter we read this past week led to a discussion on self-awareness and self-analysis, and how we can often be tempted to lean only on ourselves for self-understanding.  (By the way, there are several philosophers who have dissected this topic, much more eloquently and thoroughly than I could ever hope to...read through Levinas, Derrida, Gadamer, Heidegger, Husserl, etc. and their thoughts on Phenomenology and "the Other.")  I thought about the parallels between figuring out who I am in the context of community and when I need to figure out where I am when I'm reading a map on the trail.

Above is a topographic map of one of the areas in which we lead courses over the summer.  It takes the right perspective to be able to translate that green and white map with squiggly brown lines and be able to accurately see where you are on the map when what you see in front of you on the trail looks more like this:

That's a picture taken by a friend of mine during my first course with SROM as we were hiking in the Wind River Range.  (I know, it's gorgeous.  Even looking at it now, I can't believe it's real and that I got to stare at it while I ate my dinner that night.)  This is Squaretop Mountain...you can find it on the map above in the lower middle leftish.  The tricky part about reading maps is that you can't ever rely on only one feature (a mountain, ridge, lake, river, etc...something that's not likely to completely change a whole lot over time) to tell you where you are.  Unless you're exceedingly familiar with the area in which you're traveling, you can't accurately determine your location based on one point.  For example, based on the perspective of the picture above, can you figure out where on the map the picture was taken?  You can't do it based on looking at Squaretop alone, you have to take into consideration the mountains to the right in the picture and the field in which you're standing.  

In orienteering, we use a method called "triangulation" to help determine more accurately where you are on a map.  The basics of it involve looking first to see what features you can determine around you...you have to see where you actually are first.  A common mistake is to try and first focus on the map and project what you see on the map onto the features around you.  Instead of looking around at where you actually are and seeing a large, square mountain in front of you, a field around you, and a set of mountains to your right, there is the temptation to look at the map first and find things on the map that might possibly resemble what you see around you.  The danger here is that, rather than getting an accurate picture of where you are, you're trying to force where you want to be or where you think you are on the map to be the reality of where you are.  "Based on the map, we should see this feature which....uh...could be that over there...."

Triangulation, when done incorrectly, will let you lead yourself further and further away from where you want to be with the utmost confidence in yourself.  However, when done correctly, triangulation will give you a pretty accurate idea of where you are on the map, it can help you plan out the path of least resistance, and can help you prepare to be expecting as you move forward.  

In a similar way, God puts us in community to give us an accurate picture of who we are and where He would like us to be going.  I'm not saying that we should all go out and get analyzed by every single person in our community, but I have found a lot of benefit in getting to know and be truly known by two or three close friends...people that are solid and are not likely to completely change a whole lot over time.  People who are willing to help me get an accurate picture of my strengths, my weaknesses, my successes, my failures, my gifts and abilities, my temptations and shortcomings, and how to continue to grow into becoming a woman after God's own heart who walks in the freedom of knowing that she is Beloved of the Lord.  As much as I might prefer to trust my own intuition and my own self-analysis, that would be tantamount to walking into an unknown wilderness area and trusting in my "gut" to lead me to a good, safe path.  (Spoiler alert: that is how people get lost in the mountains and die.)  

I need a map and compass in the wilderness.  I need to actually use and pay attention to the map.  I need to know how to use the map and compass correctly.  And when I don't know how to do those things, I need to seek perspective from people in my group who are much better at reading maps than I am.  I need to seek perspective from people in my group who are familiar with the territory in which we're traveling.  If we're diligent in learning from where we've been and we're accurate in our assessment of where we are, we will get to go to some pretty incredible places together.