Think of yourself as a locus for all who find relevance and meaning in who you are and in what you do. Even if, as a hypothetical example, you have no direct human contact, but rather only indirect contact with an unknown postal worker who picks up and delivers your mail, you are a center, a place at which another, in this case the worker, finds at least partial meaning for an activity in time and space. The U.S. Postal Service has mapped you. So has Google Earth. If you carry a phone, the cell phone towers also know where you are, and as we all discovered in 2013, so does the NSA.
Because your contact with others is, most likely, more complex than this simple, hypothetical relationship with another through the delivery of mail or the satellite image of your house on the Web, understanding your locus and the loci of others is integral to your self-analysis. Wherever you live, you are on some kind of formal or informal map. Someone who knows you knows where to find you. “Oh! Sam, on Tuesdays he is usually at the golf course. Barbara? She goes to the beauty salon on that day. And Frank, well, Frank’s usually at the local bar every afternoon.” Regardless of any current notions you might have about your significance in the universe, you are an integral part of this planet’s life, serving alternately and sometimes simultaneously, as center or vector in social contexts. Similarly, you have mapped others’ existence.
You are also a world in yourself, and that world can be mapped as surely as the planet on which you live. From the outset of your life, this personal mental mapping is often a matter of common sense learned by trial and error. You have walked into a grocery store for the first time, traveled the aisles, searched for milk, and made your way back to the front of the store. During subsequent trips to the same grocery store, you have walked directly to the milk. How? You followed a mental map. You have also traveled your neighborhood, your town, city, or countryside, noting features and spatial relationships. And you have noted temporal relationships, such as how long it takes to get from feature A to feature B. Your maps are not, however merely the result of your own efforts to get a grip on the layout of your world.
Culture, religion, and education, overprint other maps on your personal geography. These influences are introjections that add attitude to place. Thus, your mental maps house spatial, temporal, and attitudinal relationships. Understanding the ramifications of mental mapping means looking into what and who you are. Self-analysis might—but this is not guaranteed—reveal the motivations for your mental maps.
You have been a cartographer from birth, but you haven’t been the same cartographer. Each new map has altered the way you map space, time, and others. Take long term relationships as an example. Those two young faces change over the years. Body shapes change. But people in a relationship hardly notice the changes on the terrain they once mapped except in punctuated moments stretched over years. And as you alter the map—draw a new map of an altered terrain—you do so on a previously drawn map, much like painting over a painting, somehow making a translucent, if not transparent, overlay.
Because your contact with others is, most likely, more complex than this simple, hypothetical relationship with another through the delivery of mail or the satellite image of your house on the Web, understanding your locus and the loci of others is integral to your self-analysis. Wherever you live, you are on some kind of formal or informal map. Someone who knows you knows where to find you. “Oh! Sam, on Tuesdays he is usually at the golf course. Barbara? She goes to the beauty salon on that day. And Frank, well, Frank’s usually at the local bar every afternoon.” Regardless of any current notions you might have about your significance in the universe, you are an integral part of this planet’s life, serving alternately and sometimes simultaneously, as center or vector in social contexts. Similarly, you have mapped others’ existence.
You are also a world in yourself, and that world can be mapped as surely as the planet on which you live. From the outset of your life, this personal mental mapping is often a matter of common sense learned by trial and error. You have walked into a grocery store for the first time, traveled the aisles, searched for milk, and made your way back to the front of the store. During subsequent trips to the same grocery store, you have walked directly to the milk. How? You followed a mental map. You have also traveled your neighborhood, your town, city, or countryside, noting features and spatial relationships. And you have noted temporal relationships, such as how long it takes to get from feature A to feature B. Your maps are not, however merely the result of your own efforts to get a grip on the layout of your world.
Culture, religion, and education, overprint other maps on your personal geography. These influences are introjections that add attitude to place. Thus, your mental maps house spatial, temporal, and attitudinal relationships. Understanding the ramifications of mental mapping means looking into what and who you are. Self-analysis might—but this is not guaranteed—reveal the motivations for your mental maps.
You have been a cartographer from birth, but you haven’t been the same cartographer. Each new map has altered the way you map space, time, and others. Take long term relationships as an example. Those two young faces change over the years. Body shapes change. But people in a relationship hardly notice the changes on the terrain they once mapped except in punctuated moments stretched over years. And as you alter the map—draw a new map of an altered terrain—you do so on a previously drawn map, much like painting over a painting, somehow making a translucent, if not transparent, overlay.
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