maps

I'm reading a book, The Scientist in the Crib, about the research that's been done into how babies' and childrens' minds work.  The authors discuss how the pathways in our minds are built from the time we're very small, and how the more an experience is repeated, the stronger a connection will be, and it reminded me so exactly of what we're doing right now in this stage of the moving process. 

We moved into our house on a pouring-rain evening a couple of weeks ago, and I held in my hand, as it were, my map of the area.  It was completely blank, except for one little dot in the middle of the page labeled "home".  The rest of the map was filled with fantastic sea serpents.  "Here there be dragons," I could just make out at one end.  I did have a very faint map from the time we lived here before, but it was from two towns over and at least four years old. 

So I cowered inside my house for a few days, making very sure everything in here was in its place, not looking outward, because I didn't know how to get anywhere.  But before long, as will happen with cooped-up children, my little people started climbing the walls and making me feel like climbing the walls myself. So I scrawled a set of directions on the back of a Costco receipt, squared my shoulders, and ventured out.  And we drew a faint, hesitant line outward from our "home" dot.  The first place we went was here:

(You have to love the two different tennis shoes)

When we're in an unfamiliar place, we try to find something that will put us at ease.  So the first pathway we laid down was to very familiar place.

After we'd found our library, it was time to draw little lines to all the other places we regularly go.  We needed a couple of grocery stores, a church, fabric stores, a beach or two, a line up the coast to the house where our cousins live, and one down the coast to the museums at Balboa Park.  Bit by bit our map is growing outward, like the slow capillary creeping of a juice spill soaking up into a paper towel thrown over it.  And it's a funny map, really, because the lines that are the thickest, the blackest-with-ink, the lines that threaten to bleed through the paper to the other side, aren't necessarily the freeways, like they'd be on a regular map.  They're the much-loved, well-worn tracks from our home to the beach, to the fruit stand, to the library, and, always, home again. 

Our map reminds me a little of the handwriting papers my younger sister used to bring home from school.  She was so careful and intense that she drew letters on her pages that could be read like braille from the back. And, after all, the map really is like the connections built in our brains when we're little.  At first we cling to directions given us by someone else, then we make maps of our own, and soon we can read the map with our fingers like braille while we look somewhere else.  After a while we won't need the scrawled instructions anymore, but would be able to drive our beaten paths blindfolded if we had to. 

And we find that there are, in fact, no dragons, no sea serpents, but a place that is, in all the ways fundamental to us, very similar to the place we've just left.  Oddly enough, we also find that all the places we've been, all the maps we've drawn before, are not separate from the one we're drawing now, but are countries on the map that's drawn on the flyleaf of the book of our lives.  It's a map that has many discovered countries, but also many that are unexplored. 

So we continue onward, pushing out the boundaries of what we don't yet know, and deepening the tracks of what we do, all our lives drawing out our maps.

~MB~