Throw Out the Map and Follow the Stars
- Kim Reindl
- Mar 3
- 7 min read
INTENSION: Presence
TOUCHSTONE:
Extend and Receive Hospitality. Be kind to yourself and others. Create generosity and compassion through allowing space for NOT knowing. Give permission to be messy and imperfect.
A New Way Home
A couple of weeks ago, during reflection time for “The Weekly Wakeup,” I noticed words I had jotted down from that week’s poem. I had written down “let’s unlearn” and “which way is home”. These words were out of order from the way they appeared in the poem. Something about this disorderly switch made me uncomfortable. Why had I written them down that way? I wanted to switch them back as they had appeared, but instead, I decided to sit with my uneasiness. Was there something in this for me? A question perhaps, or maybe an invitation?… “Let’s unlearn“ and ”which way is home”… Unlearn which way is home? Is there an invitation in unlearning which way is home?
Metaphorically, I see home as the place you feel more yourself, the place where you are free to be who you truly are. No more masks. No more trying to live up to anyone else’s expectations. No more pretending to be someone in order to survive your job, a relationship, your community. Home is a place to relax, a place that brings you joy, where you feel welcomed and loved, just as you are. The way I see it, such is what it means to be at home.
Could it be that to find my way home—which I think is one of our deepest longings—I may need to take a different way? I ask myself, are the ways I tend to live leading me home? To be honest, my answer would be yes and no. Sometimes I follow a path that leads me to an authentic place of safety and acceptance, yet other times I follow paths that definitely do not. The paths that take me away from a loving place of belonging are often driven by expectations of success and values as defined by culture. Yet, many wise ways of being in the world, ways that prioritize connection, human dignity, and compassion, are countercultural, requiring a different path from the accepted cultural norm.
Walking a Different Path
We are drawn to what is known and comfortable. We like our old habits because they don’t require much from us. Once established, a habit is something you do without having to think much about it. Habits are attractive, because they require little cognitive energy. This can be a good thing. Yet, if life becomes too habitual, we may fail in being present to our days.
Taking a new route, learning a different way, requires energy; mental, emotional, and sometimes physical energy. Many of us would rather stay where we are, doing what we normally do, because it’s easier that way. Yet, risking something different, taking an unknown path, may be just what we need to open to a life we have not yet imagined. Sometimes it takes an unknown path to wake us up from sleepwalking our way through life.
John O’Donohue advised when talking about how thoughts shape our lives, “Take out an empty white page and ask yourself, ‘What are the seven thoughts that shape my life?’ When you get them on the page, you get a look into the secret way that you understand things. When you get the seven thoughts written down, leave them alone for a week or two. Then, take another page, some other day, and say to yourself, ‘Because I was so faithfully married to these seven thoughts, what were the seven other ones that I didn’t even flirt with. Then you get to get a look of what you’ve excluded and avoided, and places that you’ve never even thought of going in your heart, or mind, or spirit.”[1]
It seems that there something hospitable about welcoming unknown paths. Could embracing the unknown be an invitation into presence? This makes me think about how often I move through my day in an almost programed way. Although the contents of my day may change, the patterns and structures can remain the same. It seems easy to get stuck in a rut. Maybe one of the most hospitable things I can do for myself is merely to do something different.
When I think about traveling home by a different way, I am reminded of the birth story of Jesus. The Maji or wise men who came to see the Christ child were instructed to take a different way home because to take the same way would cause harm. Is the tendency to take the same path in life harmful? In taking the repeated path, always doing things the same way, can life become too worn and familiar? When such becomes too routine and predictable, do we stop seeing? Do we stop noticing life? Do we stop being present to what or who is right in front of us?
Researchers tell us that our brains need newness and change in order to be healthy.[2] I once heard a neurologist advise, brush your teeth with the other hand, walk home by a different street, drive a different route to work. He said that all of these ways of breaking with old habitual pathways offer the possibility of new pathways within the brain, exhibiting neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, also known as “brain plasticity, is a process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain.”[3] Just as our brains need a break from the old habitual ways to be healthier, perhaps breaking with old habits may open us to new ways of experiencing life more fully.
How Might We Find a New Way
I am reading the book, Kokoro, by Beth Kempton. In this book Kempton draws on Japenese wisdom as a way of approaching a life well lived. She explains the word “kokoro,” a Japanese word that means “heart mind.” This is the idea that we, as humans, have access to a heart way of knowing, and that we can use this way of knowing to help us navigate through life. Kempton goes on to say,
To be heart-mindful is to tune into the moment, focusing on what we feel in a particular situation and responding from there. It is where direct observation and logical thinking give way to a felt sense of the world… To approach your day, heart-mindfully is to walk with sensitivity to and awareness of the aliveness in everything around you, in the knowledge that nothing last forever and all will eventually fade. It’s also to recognize the feelings that arise in you in response to the world, as you encounter it in each and every moment.[4]
These days I wonder about our conditioned, accepted ways of being in the world. In the western world, we are very focused on THINKING. Everyone seems to be obsessed with getting our thoughts right. Often, it seems like the first thing people use to identify one another is their thoughts (i.e., beliefs about politics, religion, etc.). With so much division, conflict, and fear, do we need to find new ways of being human with one another? With so many of us merely surviving instead of thriving, I wonder what needs to change?
For me, I’d like to approach life more from the place of my kokoro, my heart-mind. Instead of overthinking, I’d like to try feeling my way forward into human connection. I’d like to trust something other than the well-worn path of thinking my way into relationship (i.e., Are they like me? Do they think like I do? Will they agree with me?). I’d like to dare taking a new road. For instance, I’d like to sit with a person and get a sense of who they are, a heart sense, first. Perhaps getting to know others through a deeper human connection, before discussing thoughts and ideas, may offer an opening for relationship.
When I get stuck or hung up on things in life, that “stuckness” is often of my own making. I cannot see my way out of the situation because I have my blinders on. I’m so stuck in my routine of life, my known way of thinking and doing, that I’m not open to a new way, and yet, I can sit back and complain that life is not what I want it to be. What might happen if I were to risk something different, even if that something different is very small?
If I were to do the opposite of what I normally do, what might occur? If I were to approach such as an experiment, what might I discover? For example, if I usually say no to meeting a friend when my work obligations feel overwhelming, what if I were to say yes? If my routine is to passively watch TV at the end of a long day, what if I were to pull out my old paint set for the evening? If I am known to impulsively hit send in response to a family member’s emotionally triggering text, what if I were to erase the text and sit with my feelings for a while?
Venturing Into the Unknown
Whenever I decide to follow my heart (or my gut) instead of a predetermined path, it tends to be messy and imperfect. Instead of the linear route of my rationale plan, my heart path can be circular, often spiraling up and down or back and forth. Yet, when I make room for my heart, I discover ways of life, of being, that offer me perspective in a new way. I am more likely to learn something. Such may feel risky, but it also feels life giving. Through such risking, I have a sense that I am offering hospitality to myself, allowing space for the unknown. Such space makes it possible to become present to myself. That presence to self also allows me to be more present to others and to the world around me. Greeting the unknown with hospitality and openness, instead of immediate fear and rejection, expands something within me that awakens me to the now.
The poem, “Old Maps No Longer Work,” by Joyce Rupp, comes to mind. (Read the entire poem.) This poem resonates with the part of me that longs to risk the unknown way. The poem reads,
no map, no specific directions,
no “this way ahead” or “take a left”.
how will l know where to go?
how will I find my way? no map!
but then my midlife soul whispers
“there was a time before maps
when pilgrims travelled by the stars."
What do you say? Is it time to throw out the map and follow the stars?
With love and gratitude,
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REFERENCES:
[1] John O’Donohue on Imagination; YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grumSvuUzxw&t=126s
[2] Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, “12 Ways to Keep Your Brain Young,” May 13, 2022; https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/12-ways-to-keep-your-brain-young#:~:text=Through%20research%20with%20mice%20and%20humans%2C%20scientists,provides%20a%20hedge%20against%20future%20cell%20loss.&text=Exercise%20also%20spurs%20the%20development%20of%20new,increases%20the%20connections%20between%20brain%20cells%20(synapses).
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557811/#:~:text=Neuroplasticity%2C%20also%20known%20as%20neural,functional%20changes%20to%20the%20brain.
[4] Beth Kempton, Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived, Chapter 2, “Heart-Mindfulness,” Story Publishing, LLC; Oct. 1, 2024; https://bethkempton.com/kokoro-2/
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