#2 Straight lines and diversions (the map is not the territory)

100 miles of walking in unfamiliar territory for someone whose navigational skills are notoriously bad (see the Space Walk blog from a couple of years ago) may not seem like too sensible an idea, so from the beginning I decided to take the experience as a beautiful opportunity to learn – about map reading and from mistakes. Overall, I think we did pretty well: The guide said the route was 90 miles; we did it in 97!

To offset my lack of an innate navigational radar (if that’s a thing), I got a trial of Ordnance Survey Maps online. It solved my two biggest navigational issues: knowing where I am at any one time, and grasping scale. It uses GPS to place you on the map, so potential fail-point one was sorted, and you can zoom in and out, which helps a lot to rectify an absent sense of scale. A landscape full of natural and human-made features makes it a bit easier too, more so than somewhere like the Peak District. I began to see that this just might work! Oh, and we had a guide book too in the form of words and pictures which suited me much better!

I was buoyed by a friend who navigates brilliantly (so I’ve never had to). She reckons keeping an eye on the lay of the land matters just as much as the map; I’m the one who spots the footpath sign or the stile in the hedge or the field boundary we’ve just missed, while she’s still got her head in the 1:2500! I hadn’t really recognised this as a skill or a contribution to team navigation before, so I appreciated her words as we walked.

There’s a pre-supposition from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that goes, ‘the map is not the territory’. It’s the idea that any representation (map) of reality is always a simplification of that reality (territory), and the two shouldn’t be confused. For example, your mental model or map of a situation, person or experience is not the same as the actual situation, person or experience. The map, made up of values, beliefs, memories, language, experiences etc. is useful and sometimes essential, but it’s always partial and can be misleading, particularly if it’s operating at an unconscious level. The territory is the full, messy reality that no map can ever fully capture.

Walking so many miles and wrestling with a map for some of them brought this home. People don’t always respond to the world directly; they respond to their personalised map of it which they’ve created over time and which can be limiting, sending people in directions that no longer serve them. Coaching can help people become their own cartographers. As they grow in awareness and explore how their beliefs, values and memories shape their experience of reality, they begin to re-map what they understand of the world and how they can navigate their own (perfectly meandering, tangential) path through it.

Distracted with conversation and the majesty of the landscape, we did make a few navigational errors. We took them in good spirit; the purpose of pilgrimage as I mentioned in my previous pilgrimage piece is to embrace community and connection after all, and we were focussed on that! One slip up led us to a conversation with a group of walkers high on a hill overlooking fields of hops, a new vista to me and an extra mile of walking well spent; another led to a few too many nettles for our liking, but that just made getting to our accommodation (which did include a hot tub!) after a 16 mile hike all the more wonderful. 

Straying from where you think you should be on the map can be the most rewarding part of a journey rather than a point of failure (one of the questions in my coaching cards asks something similar, accompanied by the trig point image from earlier. 

 If we’d have stayed strictly to the map, we’d have missed conversation, a stunning view and an opportunity for all three of us to be in a photo!

Equally, not every diversion is delightful, and that’s fine too. Maybe the nettles taught us that journeys sometimes contain more difficult sections and that we can’t expect to navigate ‘perfectly’ all the time. 

In fact, those imperfections are what make us delightfully human and the nettles all part of the walk. Acceptance is a work in progress for me, as is self-compassion and this journey has taught me a little more about both.

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