The Map and the Territory

Being born must be the most shocking thing that ever happens to you. All your experience up to that point is in a nice, temperature-controlled environment. It suddenly gets colder, possibly much colder. You are used to it being dark. It suddenly gets much brighter. The noises you have heard to date are those of your mother’s body and some muffled sounds from elsewhere. The former disappear and the latter become very loud. You get held for the first time. After nine months of weightlessness floating in amniotic fluid, gravity makes your acquaintance.

Surprises happen all the time but unless one is truly testing the bounds of human experiences, they are generally things we know could happen. The surprise is that they have happened to us. If you are old enough to get dumped, you are old enough to be aware that people do get dumped. The shock is that someone has had the temerity to do it to you. Similarly, lottery players know someone wins the jackpot – there is no point in playing otherwise- the novelty is learning that it really could be you.

A new-born, by contrast, goes through a set of experiences which it has not only never had, but it could have no conception it could have. Nothing in its experience suggests that the temperature can suddenly drop. Or that it can get bright. The first minutes of life must result in the complete collapse of an existing mental model. The more you think about it, the more surprising it becomes that any of us ever survive.

But survive all of us have and we have done so by doing the only reasonable thing in the circumstances – we learn. No sooner are we pitched into this strange new environment than we start to try to work it out. Perfectly rational – your chances of survival are higher in an environment you understand.

But this learning is not the matter of an instant. There is too much for that. It takes time, it takes observation and it takes a certain amount of trial and error. Babies and infants, it is now thought, approach the world in a reasonably scientific manner, conducting experiments to learn how it works and, no less importantly, how the people around them work. The day I was discovered, fridge door open, dropping eggs on the floor was not evidence of some malformation of character (that would come later) but an attempt to learn about gravity, the robustness of eggshells, my mother’s reaction to a messy floor, and the dog’s approach to unexpected food. As an experiment, it was a resounding success – I gathered robust data across all four domains. You can’t build a mental model without breaking some eggs…

At a certain point, we discover a new object to explore: ourselves. Once we become aware that we exist as separate, conscious entities (generally by eighteen months or so), we find ourselves fascinating; “what can I do” joining “what does this do” and “how do they work” as questions we need to solve. And in this, we get a lot of help. Parents often expose their offspring to a range of different activities, allowing them to work out what they like and what they are good at. Schools do too. There is far more on the curriculum than there would be if the education system were purely designed to churn out worker drones. Not all schools are equal, of course – a pupil at Post-Industrial Hellhole Comprehensive is unlikely to learn about their abilities in a rowing boat, a boy at Eton will quickly find out if he is a “wet-bob” – but by the time we leave school, we are like the character at the start of so many videogames – we may have woken up in a strange location with no idea how we got there, but we have done a sweep of the area, and oriented ourselves. We are clever, we are sporty, we are artistic. On the shattered ruins of our pre-partum model, we have drawn a new map, not only of an unexpected world, but of our unexpected selves.

But there we generally leave it. It is not that we stop learning but, after we have gained a degree of training in whatever job we choose, we stop learning new subjects. We expand our skills in areas we have already explored – knowing how to cook, we may learn a new dish – but we rarely add an entirely new skillset. Our knowledge deepens, but it does not widen unless forced – only children such as myself (or youngest siblings) have never had to take the “childcare” course until we have children of our own… As a rough estimate, I have acquired only four new, non-professional skills since leaving university and one of those (riding a bike) was making up for an obvious gap.

Not that we get much encouragement. Society, supportive of our childhood attempts at self-discovery, prefers that we stop exploring and start producing. Those who want to “find themselves” are, in the words of Bob Roberts, “hippie freaks”. And producing takes time. It takes energy. Work all day, go home and see your children, and having to cross town to the kintsugi class you’ve signed up for just doesn’t seem that attractive anymore. Not when the TV is in the corner of the room.

Learning a new skill can seem self-indulgent, if learned for its own sake. It takes time away from all the other things we really should be doing. But it also seems inessential. If we have lived our entire lives without knowing if we have a talent for Japanese pottery, there is no real need to find out. Not today, anyway. We know who we are. What we could discover is, at best, an expansion pack for the game we already know and love.

“The map,” Albert Korzybski said, “is not the territory.” True for geography, but true for humans too. For having spent our childhoods exploring our terrain, as adults we decide that we know it. What we have discovered is what there is. There are no new worlds to conquer, no terra incognita where there be dragons waiting for our ships to arrive. We are what we know ourselves to be. Our map is our territory.

But, of course, the Americas were there whether or not the Europeans knew about them. The dark heart of Africa did not suddenly spring into being when David Livingstone decided to go there. So with ourselves. You and I have some degree of latent ability to play the flugelhorn. On all the evidence of my life so far, yours is probably far greater than mine. That none of us has chosen to find it does not change that fact. It just lies there waiting. As the Victoria Falls did.

Not all explorations expand the map of course, some of them disprove it. No-one ever did find Prester John’s kingdom and if Columbus discovered America (leaving aside the historical controversies), doing so showed that there was no direct route West from Europe to China as many at the time (himself included) thought. Seeking new territory leaves us open to the risk that what we thought we knew was wrong. You may believe yourself to be a good sportsman, but if you take up a new sport and fail miserably, are you?

For the likelihood is that, in the initial stages at least, you will fail. You generally have to be bad before you can be good. In horse-riding, another of my additions, the rule of thumb is that you have to have fallen off seven times before you can be classed a “good rider”. That’s a lot of bruises (if you’re lucky and don’t break anything), and not just to the flesh. Adults are meant to be competent. Adults prefer to see themselves as competent. Do you want to be standing in a park, sore and with jodhpurs covered in fresh mud as Dobbin canters into the distance, tourists snapping away on their phones? Or would you prefer to stick to what you know you are good at? What probably won’t hurt you and certainly won’t humiliate you?

Our internal cartographers are funny things. I learned a new language last year well enough to read a serious book in it. I wouldn’t yet say I speak it. I have explored it and mapped it but, for whatever reason, I have not yet planted my flag and coloured it pink. In some ways though, I have. Reading one book led me to try another book. But before I cracked it open, there was a hesitation. A reluctance. What if I couldn’t read it? What would that do to my map? Would it not mean that it was wrong, that my freshly inked lines would need to be rubbed out? Maybe I should just stick with what I knew.

But thinking you are what you know means you never know what you are. The second book was easier than I feared. I could just read it on the train. Did I understand every word? No. Did I get what was going on and enjoy it? Yes. Reading it told me my command of the language was actually better than I thought. It brought my map into closer alignment with the territory that was already there, waiting to be discovered.

We have, certain traditions aside, only one life, only one opportunity to discover what this thing that is “us” really is. What it can do and, no less importantly, what it can’t. No-one leaves school and thinks they have “finished” maths, or “finished” chemistry (Wittgenstein thought he had “finished” philosophy for a while but a) he was Wittgenstein and b) he realised he was wrong). But when it comes to ourselves in all our infinite complexity, we are often happy to declare “job done”, there are no more selves to know.

Alexander of Macedon wept salt tears because “there are so many worlds and we have not yet conquered this one” (pro-tip: if this quote surprises you, don’t learn your Ancient History from a darts commentator). Should we not do the same if, even though we can never entirely know ourselves, we do not seek to discover as much of ourselves as possible? We only get one shot, and that’s a lot of money to leave on the table. All it takes is putting down the map and taking a step into the territory.

Now, where can I buy a flugelhorn?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.

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